French Quote Marks
So this isn’t gaming related, but just shoot me now.
If I thought Spanish books were hard with their odd dashed quotation mark system and pronoun dropping, French is apparently 3 million times worse.
Today, I got the rude awakening on the French quotation system when I happened to find a sample of the Hunger Games in French.
First, a tangent. I credit Los Juegos del Hambre (the Spanish Hunger Games) with being a huge part of my getting comfortable with Spanish.
I hadn’t read the book series before, but I happened to have seen some of the text, so I knew it was in the present tense, and I figured it would be a good first read.
Turns out it was. And hilariously, when I’d consult the English text, I’d often find it to be stilted. I don’t think I would’ve ever read/enjoyed the English version of the series as much as I did the Spanish version (props to translator Pilar Ramirez Tello).
Well, the Hunger Games was also my introduction to the quotation dash as seen in Spanish fiction.
Here’s a random example:
—¿Qué mas da? —repite, en tono brusco—. Deja que suba.
Since I don’t have the English version, we’ll just make a guess, but it reads something like:
“What does it matter?” he repeats in a brusk tone. “Let her up.”
English makes it so much easier to tell when the speaking begins and ends, and especially so when smart quotes are used (which I’m pretty sure are standard in English books).
Here’s the French:
— Quelle importance ? répète-t-il d’une voix bourrue. Qu’elle s’avance donc. Prim pousse des hurlement hystériques derrière moi.
Um, WTF French? As an English native, let me list all of the things wrong here:
- nothing indicates when the dialogue ends. Unlike in Spanish where it’s a bit more confusing but somewhat equivalent to English’s style of quotes, with the French usage of the quotation dash, you get one dash per paragraph PERIOD.
- if someone starts talking again midway into a paragraph, there is zero visual indication that the person has started talking again; you have to go completely on context
- apparently Guillaume Fournier is allergic to the return/enter key, because when the bit about Prim starts, the subject has changed and so it really should be a new paragraph (it is in the Spanish, and I’d be willing to bet that the English has it as a new paragraph too)
And good grief, please tell me that Guillaume Fournier is an anomaly because, from scanning, this mec
appears to be totally allergic to paragraphs. It didn’t take me long to find several examples of paragraphs that rambled on for literally several pages.
I mean, FFS, the very first paragraph of the book is 3 pages long.
And to put it pretty crassly, it reminds me of the rambling writing style of people who don’t know when to shut the f*ck up (this includes me, but at least I know how to use a paragraph).
Like I said, I hope this allergy to paragraphs is an anomaly (though I’m pretty sure the quotation system is something that’s common to French fiction), because given how much of an impact reading the Hunger Games in Spanish had on me, I would hate to miss a similar opportunity in French.
But so far, this just goes to reinforce what I’ve been thinking:
Standard French is the language I love to hear. Castilian Spanish is the language I love to read.
[Cough. Latin American Spanish and Standard French are pretty much neck and neck on languages I love to hear though.]