niuttuc: Alright, people that followed me for a little while or talked with me on Discord know that
niuttuc: Alright, people that followed me for a little while or talked with me on Discord know that I’m not the biggest fan of Magic’s French translation. I don’t particularly blame the translators on the many, many shortcomings of it, mainly @wizardsmagic for not giving them the necessary time or ressources to produce a perfect result. If Pondering Mage doesn’t refer Ponder in French, it’s probably that the translators weren’t informed it had to and other languages may have been better informed, knew the game better or have ended up with the same word from a similar start. So, when I first saw Thundering Djinn and its meta flavor text with two levels of reading whether people knew the cards lightning bolt and brainstorm or not, I expected the French translation to either be a litteral one that doesn’t carry any double meaning, or something that tried to use the cards’ names and failed spectacularly. I was positively disappointed in the best ways. Instead of trying to translate the untranslatable pun, they went with something else, with a slightly different meaning. “It hits like a stroke of genius.” Just like that, it’s not much. But the expression “stroke of genius”, in French, is “éclair de génie”, or “Bolt of Genius”. First reading is that, and is already better than what I expected from the translation. On the second reading, we remember something… Probably accidental, but happens to work. (By the way, the translation on the flavor text of that card is atrocious considering it adds an actual exclamation using a very dated and very, very French expression. But lets stay positive.) So on the second reading, it’s a reference to a card that draws card and that it can use to deal damage. That’s neat and echoes the English one, even if it’s with a much less iconic card. But it doesn’t stop there! Éclair de génie is made of three words. “De” is “of” and isn’t too important. Éclair is a word that means a lightning bolt (not the one for the card lightning bolt though, that went with the better sounding Foudre that works as well). Génie can mean genius, as it does in the idiom we saw before… But also means Genie. Or, in other words, djinn. So the flavor text also reads “It strikes like the bolt of a djinn.” This translation of this random flavor text has three different readings, which is especially impressive given the constraints of length (to fit on the card), meaning (to fit the flavor of the text) and ressources (imposed by wizards) put on the translation team (or individual). Great job on that one! -- source link