Outside the Box

Extract from a recent article by Sam Taylor in the FT on the art of translation.

‘What you are translating is never simply a series of signs or letters on a page but a set of unspoken assumptions and values....you can’t translate a pun...you have to think laterally. Which is how the British leader Zebigbos becomes Mykingdomforanos’ (in Astérix)’.

Ah yes, translation is often thinking laterally, thinking outside the box. Now that is very difficult to translate into French. In fact French thinking is likely to be anything but lateral or outside the proverbial.

How would you translate it ? ‘Sortir des sentiers battus’, ‘sortir du cadre’ ?

As you can see the French seems to see this as leaving the road or breaking out of a frame (cadre), a type of transgression. 

The English (by which I mean English language) mind sees it as a brilliant solution to difficult puzzle.

This is now languages somehow manage to see the world differently.