Four members give their impressions of this workshop: Carol Hebden, Amanda Mannix, Maddie Sangway and Hélène Wilkinson
Carol Hebden
Gallicisms of Structure – an enticing workshop title. I signed up to learn more about the pitfalls and best practice of translating between French and English. Grant Hamilton shone light on the cultural idiosyncrasies of language structure, talking us through more than thirty examples taken from professional websites. Takeaway nuggets included the English love of doublets and their dislike of nouns (they are far more partial to verbs).
The art and craft of translation. There’s a doublet for you, right away. To quote Grant, ‘English sounds like two people chatting to one another’. And we use doublets without even realising it: nooks and crannies, bits and pieces, ups and downs, ins and outs. And around one third of the doublets that Grant had found in the Anglocom archives also relied on alliteration: impacting and influencing, elevating and empowering, compiling and combining, restore and renew. Doublets occur in French too, of course, (des hauts et des bas) but don’t always translate naturally; it’s the flow that counts. The omission of the doublet here below indicates a cultural pattern at work.
Les decisions doivent être adaptées à la réalité des differents milieux.
The decisions must reflect the needs and concerns of different types of communities.
Are you struggling to decide between ‘’safety’ or ‘security’, when translating ‘sécurité’? Grant suggested trying both. He pointed out several reasons for resorting to this strategy: the sentence falls flat without a doublet; the doublet helps clarify meaning. His advice was to listen to the rhythm and decide what the text might have been had it been written in English from the outset.
If the English are partial to a doublet, they are resistant to the overuse of nouns. Grant pointed out how English speakers are hardwired to favour action, and how French speakers prefer contemplation. The frequency of either is key. Overuse of one or the other can be disquieting for the target reader (too action-packed for French readers, or overly contemplative if English-speaking).
Take the following example, from a survey of attendees at an event. It contains the question: ‘Avez vous une meilleure compréhension de la littérature financière au term de l’événement?’ ‘Did you have a deeper understanding…’ might fit the bill. It follows the language structure and makes sense. But how might you beef up the verb for a stronger English appeal?
Did the event deepen your understanding of…?
Did you leave the event with a deeper understanding of …?
I would highly recommend attending further talks by Grant Hamilton on the topic of cultural structures. It has certainly given me some different angles to consider when assessing my own work. As a parting gift, he shared a link to Word of the Week on the TRSB website. For the TermStormers of the ITI French Network, here is Match That Word!
Carol Anne Hebden, French to English subtitler, literary translator.
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Amanda Mannix
Without providing any statistical evidence, I can confidently say that AI has been by far the most-discussed topic among language professionals over the last couple of years – and for good reason – so it was a breath of fresh air to see the FrenchNet events team announcing Grant Hamilton’s Gallicisms of Structure workshop in October. His background as a translator, agency owner and trainer means he is well placed to point out the easily-spotted as well as the more covert characteristics of French grammar and structure that can smuggle themselves in to translations, creating less-than-natural English text. Attendees were given the 37 examples discussed in the workshop in advance, and I greatly appreciated the opportunity to focus and reflect beforehand.
From working with different tenses (present perfect and conditional), to being reminded of the many differences between variants of English, Grant’s sample sentences – all drawn from actual jobs – gave us plenty of material to help us get under the bonnet of our craft.
Some of the more apparent structural transfers included using the literal ‘It is possible for customers to…’ for ‘Il est possible de…’ in a bank’s literature, amended to the more personal ‘Customers can’, and retaining a hanging phrase at the start of a sentence – ‘Honorés, la ville…’ – in the translation as ‘Deeply honoured, the city…’, ultimately corrected to ‘This was a great honour for the city…’. Grant used a number of examples to remind us that producing a more natural flow in English of noun-heavy French can be obtained by using verbs, giving the translation of ‘Boîte de courriel réservée aux concessionnaires…’ as ‘Created a dedicated inbox for dealers…’, or energising the target text by adding verbs, as in ‘Challenges that life may bring’ for ‘Les défis de la vie’ or ‘The feedback you share’ for ‘Vos réponses’.
Some of the structural elements that might be more easily overlooked are punctuation, such as the ellipsis (typically used in French to represent ‘etc.’ in English), the order of items in a list – which doesn’t necessarily remain the same in the target text – or singular nouns in English where French commonly uses plurals (‘cardiovascular disease’ for ‘maladies cardiovasculaires’).
A useful tool highlighted by Grant that I have not used much in my own work was back-translating, to produce a more objective view of the source text structure and help get to the real message of the text. I also valued the discussion around bringing couplets into a translation, such as ‘needs and concerns’ for ‘la réalité’ or ‘fine-tune and adapt’ for ‘s’adapter en transformant’.
Along with enjoying and learning from the lively and fertile chat generated in Grant’s workshop, my biggest take-away was the importance of approaching a translation from two different viewpoints: the detailed – where the subtleties of individual words, phrases and sentences are considered and debated – and the more general, where we step back and see the structure of the source text with a more critical eye.
Amanda Mannix MITI, French to English translator and copy-editor, specialising in social science, education and marketing texts
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Maddie Sangway
Have you ever wondered what it is that makes a translation sound so much like a translation? Ever pondered the specificities of what makes English English? Grant Hamilton, celebrated French-English translator and founder of the Québécois translation company Anglocom, has the answers.
Over a two-part workshop this past November, Grant provided us eager translators with more than 30 examples of translations that were all passable, but which didn’t necessarily have the flair of English writing. It proved to be a very fruitful two hours, during which we flooded the chat box with our answers and solutions to what didn’t sound quite right, and from which we emerged with some concrete answers to help our translations feel more believable.
As a student of translation who has barely commenced her translation career, I found these workshops to be invaluable, particularly as someone who likes the rules of language explained.
Our first example of French-influenced English featured a hanging adverbial at the beginning of the sentence, which Grant pointed out is something rarely found in English.
We then looked at the cognate major for the French majeur. Whilst this cognate can sometimes be a good solution, Grant highlighted that it is often overused and that English offers plenty more adjectives which would be better suited to the specific context of the text.
We continued to analyse the abstraction vs concretisation of French vs English, specifically the English love of a personalised sentence. Where the French will use their impersonal on as the subject, the English will specify clients, customers, we, etc.
Another structural difference is the English adoration for a verb. Grant noted that even in technical documents, the audience is foregrounded and verbs are prevalent. So, when it comes to translation, take the French nouns and verbalise, verbalise, verbalise!
One of my personal favourite discoveries from this workshop was that of the English love of a “redundant doublet”: terms and conditions, hopes and dreams, needs and concerns… The more you think about them, the more doublets you’ll find. This is a sure-fire way to move your translation further from the original French.
Now, these may be elements that you know, that you think are obvious. But it can be all too easy to find yourself influenced by the structure of the original. By actively workshopping these sentences, we found ourselves far better equipped to produce English-sounding translations. Through Grant’s assistance, we left with the words to explain exactly what the issues can be and what solutions may help.
The overarching advice was to simply put on your writer’s cap. Find the juice of the text and put the emphasis on that. Ignore the source structure and think English!
Maddie Sangway, MA Translation student at the University of Surrey (English, French, and Spanish)
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Hélène Wilkinson
In November 2025, the ITI French Network organised a two-part webinar on Gallicisms of Structure. It was facilitated by Grant Hamilton, who boasts a dizzying translating career spanning thirty years of translation – so far – “for the love of beautiful English”. No wonder so many people attended this event. (You can find more details on his biography here.)
The format for the session consisted of sentences written in French and the corresponding English translation. Grant then challenged us to spot anything that felt “odd”. There were discussions on the chat (thanks to moderator Alanah) and in the end, the gallicisms were vanquished, appropriate English terms and turns of phrase were produced and a more authentic version was created.
Most people attending this training session would have been familiar with a number of gallicisms: for example, English texts prefer verbs to nouns and the opposite is true for French texts. However, things quickly got more complicated…
Here are just a few of my personal favourite points from those Grant offered.
French readers require “permission” before they get to the point. For example, “Cette solution nous permet d’avancer dans nos projets.” (I made this up.) Actually, it serves no purpose at all – but “permet” is very, very frequent and should not subsist in English.
Another example: an English reader coming across the words “try to find another tool” (again, my example) wouldn’t feel like belittled. In a way, “try to” is understated and just makes things more pleasant. Incidentally, it struck me that “permet” and “try to” are really quite similar: both suggest a sort of politeness, or at least attenuation.
I’ve already mentioned this above – but if in doubt, add a verb! In English not only does a verb often do the job without requiring a noun, adding another one can tell a story even better. As a case in point I was recently racking my brains over the French source text I was working on (one far too dry to reproduce here) and could only produce a particularly wonky translation. Yet all it needed was a little “be” to jolt the rest of the sentence along nicely.
I’m sorry to say that a touch of frost fell on the proceedings halfway through. One clan couldn’t stomach “youth” and the other found “amongst” just too pernickety… However, I’m pleased to relate that hostilities ended when we realised that there was a consensus among[st] (most?) attendees, who heartily hate “reaching out”.
The detail and analysis was enormously useful. It included discussions on the word “osé”, which does not usually map to “bold”; geographic issues; the subtle difference between competition and competitors; plurals and singulars (one of the many things that systematically oppose the French and English languages, just to make our task even harder); and compound sentences that could probably fill a book.
One last word: Grant is known for the invaluable Match the word tool, but I’d like to add that FrenchNet’s online TermStorm sessions are always useful too!
Hélène Wilkinson, French to English translator and subtitler, specialising in research and higher education.
