TRADUCTIONS ANGLAIS LV 1 BCE 2008
TRADUCTION DE FRANÇAIS EN ANGLAIS
Tout en lui massant les pieds et les chevilles, son père lui dit: « J’ai croisé Rouvière, tout à l’heure. Il venait de te voir. Il m’a complimenté pour ta bonne mine. »
« Qu’est-ce qu’il t’a raconté ? »
« Rien. Que les temps sont durs. Que nous aurons un parlement de fer au deuxième tour des législatives. Mais toi ? De quoi voulais-tu lui parler? »
« De timbres-poste», dit Mathilde. Son père sait depuis toujours comment elle est cachottière, il ne s’en émeut plus.
« Tiens donc. Tu t’intéresses à une foule de choses depuis quelque temps. La bicyclette, la boxe, Ie vin d’Anjou, maintenant les timbres. »
« Je m’instruis, dit Mathilde. Tu devrais essayer; toi aussi. Je suis sûre que tu serais incapable de citer le nom d’un seul bateau faisant la traversée San Francisco-Vancouver en 1898. ( … ). »
Il rit.
« Tu me fais marcher. Mais quel rapport avec les timbres-poste? »
« Alors là, c’est encore plus difficile, même pour moi. Tu ne vas pas me croire. »
« Mais oui, je vais te croire. »
Sébastien Japrisot, Un long dimanche de fiançailles, Éditions Denoël, 1991
TRADUCTION D’ANGLAIS EN FRANÇAIS
They were older when they married than most of their married friends: in their well-seasoned late twenties. Both had had a number of affairs, sweet rather than bitter; and when they fell in love – for they did fall in love – had known each other for some time. They joked that they had saved each other ‘for the real thing’. That they had waited so long (but not too long) for this real thing was to them a proof of their sensible discrimination. A good many of their friends had married young, and now (they felt) probably regretted lost opportunities; while others, still unmarried, seemed to them arid, self-doubting, and likely to make desperate or romantic marriages.
Not only they, but others, felt they were well-matched: their friends’ delight was an additional proof of their happiness. They had played the same roles, male and female, in this group or set, if such a wide, loosely connected, constantly changing constellation of people could be called a set. They had both become, by virtue of their moderation, their humour, and their abstinence from painful experience, people to whom others came for advice. They could be, and were, relied on. It was one of those cases of a man and a woman linking themselves whom no one else had ever thought of linking, probably because of their similarities. But then everyone exclaimed: Of course! How right! How was it we never thought of it before!
And so they married amid general rejoicing, and because of their foresight and their sense for what was probable, nothing was a surprise to them.
Doris LESSING, To Room Nineteen, in A Man and Two Women, Ed. Jonathan Clowes, 1963
