OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG SQUEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!

My Snupin Santa present showed up tonight: it's La traque des Baskerville - "The Hounding of the Baskervilles" translated into French! (author's notes and all, including my standard disclaimer and my confession of having nearly included Luna/Yoda).

As some of you may recall, it's a long honking story, peppered with obscure quotations, allusions, slang, and colloquialisms. Translating straightforward writing is plenty challenging as it is - I can barely begin to imagine how long it took my mystery translator to parse my mayhem and come up with a French equivalent (and it was likely a complete pain in the tuchis to code and format, too). It's clear that she (*) invested a lot of time and thought into choosing the right words, and researching the ones unknown to her -- there are footnotes for "clapper bridge," "gothling" (hell, I didn't know a definition existed for that word), "pilchard," and "vorpal," and another one about not being able to find French variations of "watched pots don't boil" and "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink" (you see what she was up against?).

In other words, of all the things they could have picked, my Snupin Santa selected the longest, wackiest fic of the bunch and worked like a fiend to transform it into "La traque." I am so freaking impressed I'm all but hyperventilating here, and I've printed out all 59 pages, both to sneak glances at it during upcoming choir rehearsals (i.e., when other sections are going over their parts) and to savor it properly once my other obligations stop nipping at my heels. OMG OMG OMG. The Potterverse is fun in French - Hogwarts is Poudlard, Slytherins are Serpentards, Quibbler is Chicaneur, to Apparate is to Transplanant, St. Mungo's is Sainte Mangouste, the Dark Mark is la Marque des Ténèbres -- see, this is why I love looking at translations of poems and stories I've already read in English: because languages don't correspond exactly to each other - not in cadence nor in nuance nor in appearance ("des Ténèbres," for instance, translates literally to "of darkness" or "of gloom" or "of shadows" -- and it's a word that always reminds me of Tenebrae), and the difference in associations and textures -- I could go on all day on how nifty it is, when I can look at a piece in both French and English and contemplate how close and yet how unalike they are. Sometimes I'll look up the French words to see if the translator made a literal or figurative choice, and I expect to be doing that a lot with my giftie; for instance, I just looked up "chèvrefeuille," which is indeed the French term for "honeysuckle" - which is not intuitive, because "chèvrefeuille" literally means "goat-leaf." How could I not be entertained by that?

I know I'm babbling, but languages are so cool, and this is such an awesome gift. *hugs it tightly to self and goes running around in more circles of incoherent joyfulness*


*I'm assuming the translator's a "she," given both demographics and the likeliest suspects.

Cross-posted from my fandom journal.