{"id":606,"date":"2017-11-09T20:12:17","date_gmt":"2017-11-09T20:12:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/?p=606"},"modified":"2026-04-12T04:42:55","modified_gmt":"2026-04-12T04:42:55","slug":"the-french-historical-present-tense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/2017\/11\/09\/the-french-historical-present-tense\/","title":{"rendered":"The French Historical Present Tense"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ata-fld-newsletter-logo\"<\/a><\/p>\n

by Bruce Popp<\/em><\/p>\n

As professional French-into-English translators, we commonly encounter the French historical present tense<\/em> in meeting minutes and reports of clinical cases written by doctors. In these documents, the writers use the present tense (and thereby avoid repeated use of the pass\u00e9 compos\u00e9 and imparfait) to describe events that occurred sometime earlier. To my mind this can seem like some kind of historical reenactment. \u201cWe are standing next to the village green in Lexington. On one side Capt. Parker is steadying his company of colonial militia and on the other the vanguard of the King\u2019s Own 10th<\/sup> Regiment of Foot is marching into sight.\u201d<\/p>\n

We deal with the French historical present tense by translating it into a past tense in English. This reflects how the corresponding documents would be written in English by a US native speaker. \u201cThe patient, a 58-year-old female, was seen in the emergency department.\u201d \u201cThe meeting was called to order and the minutes from the previous meeting approved.\u201d<\/p>\n

I recently encountered a couple examples where the people preparing the translations failed to recognize and correctly handle the French historical present. Let me start by explaining the context in which I encountered these errors and then showing them to you.<\/p>\n

After translating one book by Poincar\u00e9 and signing a publishing contract, I wanted to continue my relationship with Poincar\u00e9 so I started to look at what to translate next. I decided to look at an article he wrote in 1905. An enormous amount has been written about this article comparing it to one published in the same year by Albert Einstein that became the recognized foundation for the theory of special relativity. (I\u2019ve looked at some of these comparisons; they read like a description of a tennis match: Einstein said there\u2019s no ether and Poincar\u00e9 said the ether is undetectable, but the two statements amount to the same thing? 15-15.)<\/p>\n

There are in fact three published translations of this article by Poincar\u00e9 from 1905. So far I\u2019ve only looked at two; I\u2019ve been too cheap to pay for a copy of the third article. I quickly realized the both translations had a mistake in their translation of the first sentence.<\/p>\n

The first sentence in Poincar\u00e9\u2019s article is, \u201cIl semble au premier abord que la lumi\u00e8re et les ph\u00e9nom\u00e8nes optiques et \u00e9lectrique qui s\u2019y rattachent vont nous fournir un moyen de d\u00e9terminer le mouvement absolu de la Terre, ou plut\u00f4t son mouvement, non par rapport aux autres astres, mais par rapport \u00e0 l\u2019\u00e9ther.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the translation by SW, this sentence reads \u201cIt seems at first that the aberration of light and related optical and electrical phenomena will provide us with a means of determining the absolute motion of the Earth, or rather its motion with respect to the ether, as opposed to its motion with respect to other celestial bodies.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the translation that appears in a book by CWK, the sentence reads \u201cIt would seem at first sight that the aberration of light and the optical and electrical effects related thereto should afford a means of determining the absolute motion of the earth, or rather its motion relative to the ether instead of relative to the other celestial bodies.\u201d<\/p>\n

The next two sentences (still written by Poincar\u00e9 in the same tense) refer to two experiments respectively by Fresnel in the 1870s and Michelson in 1887 that tried to use \u201cun moyen de d\u00e9terminer\u201d and produced conclusive, negative results. Therefore, historically Poincar\u00e9 while writing in 1905 was describing an idea that might have been held in the late 1860s, but was no contradicted by experiment.<\/p>\n

Despite this historical clue, the people providing these two translations failed to realize that Poincar\u00e9 was using the historical present tense. I translated the sentence as, \u201cOn first consideration it seemed that the aberration of light and the optical phenomenon associated with it were going to provide us a means for determining the absolute movement of the Earth or more accurately its movement, not with respect to other stars, but with respect to the ether.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bruce D. Popp, Ph.D. is a French into English scientific and technical translator. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Bruce Popp As professional French-into-English translators, we commonly encounter the French historical present tense in meeting minutes and reports of clinical cases written by doctors. In these documents, the writers use the present tense (and thereby avoid repeated use of the pass\u00e9 compos\u00e9 and imparfait) to describe events that occurred sometime earlier. To my … Continue reading The French Historical Present Tense<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[81],"class_list":["post-606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-french-grammar"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=606"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4905,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606\/revisions\/4905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}