The developers had sent us Steam keys to get a feel for the game and so although I had some time before having to start working on it, I thought I would take a quick look at it. I started it, clicked through a very sober menu, and was then faced with an introductory scene featuring a minimal 3D setting and anime-styled character: two women in high heels, the one killing the other in a purportedly tragic scene for which I had not the slightest bit of context. Stupid prejudice got a hold of me, and I could almost feel the words “anime nonsense” on my lips, and…

… how wrong was I. 1000xRESIST is probably the best written and staged game I ever played.

Personal and political

Given this science-fiction story’s plot is very dense, non-linear, and one of the game’s strengths, I will not try and sum it up and will limit myself to the starting situation. You play as Watcher, one of the sisters serving the ALLMOTHER, a benevolent and godlike figure reigning over the Orchard, futuristic haven of a female community in which everyone has a function and a colour. Everything is very ritualised in this autarkic society, besieged by the mysterious Occupants, but everything is alright. Until one day, one of the sisters strays from the path, and then the world never is the same again.

I’ll stop here. As you’ll have understood, 1000xRESIST is mostly a narrative game. The “game” part is indeed quite barebones: you mainly walk around environments and talk to a gallery of characters. But this is soon forgotten, thanks to the many other qualities of the game, notably its writing, staging and acting. The sunset visitor 斜陽過客 team comes from the performing arts and they began creating 1000xRESIST when COVID started shutting up venues. And it shows: the voice acting is spot on, whatever the emotion conveyed, and many scenes stuck with me because of their visual construction, how they make use of the lighting, of blocking, etc.

These great strengths serve an eminently original story, about struggle and oppression, family and romantic relationships, identity and immigration. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’m not sure I ever will encounter another similar story. 1000xRESIST is the proof perfect example that the personal is political. By writing a deeply intimate narrative, the game touches on something universal. It lives with me since I have finished in, and I think I will always be thinking about it.

(And be listening to its original soundtrack.)

So what was it like to translate?

I’m not gonna lie, it was a lot. Such a dense, original and personal world deserves to be done justice. Going in, I felt a form of responsibility. A whole mythology to recreate, a lexicon to adapt, the rhythm, the humour, the allusions… The work was as complex as it was enthralling.

Just one simple example, that triggered endless discussions within our team: the names. The five main sisters within the Orchard are called Watcher, Healer, Fixer, Knower, and Bang Bang Fire. These are names, but also functions, they rhyme, they mostly have only two syllables which gives them a simple, snappy aspect. How do you find a French equivalent? How do you keep the rhythm and the simplicity when the words are all longer, have different endings, and potential translations all have very varied semantic implications? (Oh and should it not be complex enough: all these words are articulated within a poem that is constantly quoted in the game.)

It was a lot. There were a thousand solutions, and we ended up picking one (and you’ll have to check the French version to find out which!). On a personal level, I am very happy with what we agreed to, but it goes to show once again that, in translation, there is no absolute truth: only choices.

A unique piece

This project was very time- and energy-intensive, but offered the opportunity, I’d do it again without a moment’s hesitation. It is a marvel, and I’ll go so far as to say that it is a very necessary game, terribly relevant in the political era we’re living in. If you didn’t play it because you didn’t like the aesthetics or feared it would be too slow, I hope this post will make you curious enough to overlook any prejudice you might have and play through a story that is now very close to my heart.

As a conclusion, I’d like to thank my partners in crime, who are as competent as they have been patient while I humed and hawed:

• For the French version: Meredith Lacuve, Elina Macon and Killian Nari on translation, Cécile Gindrat and Jaufré Vessiller-Fonfreide on proofreading.
• For the Korean version: Lester Hong-Gi and Geonwoo Park
• For the Brazilian Portugese version: Amélia Molino and Rômulo Wehling

I would also like to thank the whole team at sunset visitor 斜陽過客 who created this fantastic story, and allowed us to translate it in the best possible conditions (thanks of course also to the publisher, Fellow Traveller, who has a knack for finding narrative marvels).

Above all, thanks to Alex, without whom none of this wonderful adventure would have happened.

I hope this game will move you as much as it moved me.

Hekki grace.

1000xRESIST was released on 9 May 2024 on Windows and Nintendo Switch. The Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions are released on Tuesday, 4 November 2025. They will come with the Korean, French and Brazilian-Portuguese translations. The game is available at a discount on Steam until 12 November 2025 and, in case I haven’t made myself clear, you should play it.

First book in what is going to be a fantasy tetralogy, The rage of dragons takes place in an Africa-inspired world (Winter grew up in Zambia, where his Xhosa ancestors lived). It tells the life of Tau, a young fighter apprentice of the Omehi, a people embroiled in a perpetual war against their Hedeni neighbours, whose land they invaded nearly two centuries before.

Tau doesn’t really want to become a warrior, but in the highly rigid and militaristic caste society of the Chosen (the name the Omehi give themselves), he doesn’t have much of a choice. He is still trying to find a way to avoid being sent to the frontlines when tragedy strikes hsi family. Joining the army then becomes his only way of quenching his thirst for vengeance.

As you’ll have gathered, this is quintessentail epic fantasy, giving pride of place to well-paced fight scenes and poignant moments, as well as a complex world and convincing characters. Winter’s fantasy also stands out because of the world he’s created: to do so, he picked elements of the history and traditions of several African countries, and ended up with something as personal as interesting to translate.

Indeed: as ever with secondary worlds (meaning they’re distinct from ours, whether we’re talking about fantasy or science-fiction), there’s a whole vocabulary to get a hold of and reinvent in the target language.

A couple examples:

• the Omehi society is made up of a dozen or so different castes, which is as many names for which you have to find the perfect equivalent, in terms of meaning AND of catchiness. And all of it without repeating yourself…
• in English, the name of peoples never agrees as an adjective or as a noun. It is not so in French, so should we keep “Omehi” in all cases? Or have it agree (e.g. “an Omehi woman” => “une femme oméhie”)?
• and what about the spelling of all these words borrowed from Zulu (isihogo, ihagu, indlovu…)? Should we keep them as is, or use a phonetical transcription, as has historically been done in French (and thus write zoulou instead of zulu)?

And I’m not mentioning all the quiet worldbuilding, the dynamic style that you must do justice, and many other things which made this translation engrossing.

La rage des dragons is thus available in all good French bookshops, and I hope that you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I did translating it.

You will find more info (reviews, etc.) on the book’s page in my portfolio

There are no major content addition compared to the previous version, but this one I built entirely with my own two hands (along with hugo, a static site generator, and PaperMod, a hugo theme).

Why take all this time to learn these tools and update my website by myself? Because I find it very fun, first. Also because I found wordpress utterly clunky. Finally, and above all, because it stems from the idea of technological reappropriation, which I find myself giving more and more importance to (I talked about it here). In short, I really like tending to my own plot of virtual garden.

And in here, I’ll be able to grow anything I want, anything that takes my fancy. For instance, readers of French will find in the Projects tab the first four short stories of the Bradbury challenge 2025. I’m supposed to write one per week for a whole year, which is not easy, but I’m holding on so far! (And I might try to translate them into English? We’ll see.)

I’ll leave you to discover the place for yourself, and I’d advise you to come back before long, because I’ll soon be announcing book releases I’m quite proud of… to be continued.

Cheers!

Very soon (read: before 2026), I should normally have a brand new website, made with my own two hands. It shouldn’t be much longer.

Meanwhile, and because you never have enough projects at the same time, I’ve decided to take part in the Bradbury challenge organized by Nouvelles corail: writing one short story per week for a whole year (so fifty-two of those). The aim: to write more.

If that sounds interesting to you, click on the link above, and if you’d like to read what I’ll manage to write, I’ve created a wee website to this end (in French only, sorry!).

Happy reading, and talk to you soon!

For many reasons (and because I have the option not to; not everybody can, I’ll come back to it). Before I list them, I need to make something clear: I say “AI” (=artificial intelligence) because it’s the word used most frequently these days to designate the large language models (generative artificial intelligence tools, the most famous of which is OpenAI’s ChatGPT) and, to a lesser extent, neural machine translation (like DeepL). These are the “tools” I oppose. I have nothing against AI when it decodes the human genome, when it detects upcoming natural disasters, or when it makes me think I’m very clever in video games. I’m no technophobe, and I have a precise target in mind when I talk about AI.

This point being settled, here’s why I’m against AI in translation.

A mediocre tool

I’ll start by acknowledging my privileged position: the main reason why I don’t use AI, is that enjoy good working conditions as a translator. The publishers I work for pay decent wages, and I don’t work for translation agencies that drive prices down and push the use of AI. I have enough work, and I’m paid well enough to avoid having to always work faster in order to put a roof over my head and bread on the table.

Therefore, why would I want to accelerate the translation process, when it is precisely this that gives me joy? Searching for the right word, reformulating a sentence ten times over to find the right phrasing, coming back to a text after letting it rest for a while and having that sweet eureka moment… I have no wish to precipitate any of this. Besides, in my fields of expertise (=books and video games), the supposed qualities of AI fall apart quite quickly. For a novel, it takes the form of consistency problems (one example among many others: in French, “tu” and “vous” being used interchangeably). Conversely, as is sometimes the case in video games, when you’re supposed to translate a few words that are incomprehensible without what shows up on the screen, AI has a hard time doing so, being unable to access this external context.

A very poor tool, then, and one I have no desire to use. Everyone should do the same, problem solved.

The French version (on the right) translates “present” as “gift” instead of as “introduce”. Context is everything.

Of course, it isn’t that simple! Because those who hire translators and push for the use of AI in translation know perfectly well that it is a mediocre tool. But they don’t care, because their real interest lies elsewhere: better productivity. Translating more, faster cheaper. When translators are asked to do post edition, that is correcting what the machine generates instead of translating, it’s “only proofreading”, after all. It’s thus perfectly normal to halve wages. Never mind if post editing is a profoundly alienating task because errors follow no human logic. Never mind is the result is barely good enough because huge text volumes are dealt with in a very short amount of time. Never mind work conditions worsening. Things go faster. They make more money.

I could stop here, and simply point out that some unscrupulous clients promote AI to save money at the expense of the expertise, health and happiness of workers who find themselves forced to be blackmailed into doing post edition. It has happened before in other fields like technical translation, and no one escapes cost reduction. Not even those who adopt the rather despicable view that “literary translation” will never suffer the AI treatment because it is too noble a task (whatever that is supposed to mean). No one escapes cost reduction.

I could stop here. Sadly enough, AI has many more problems.

About training data

If we take a step back from the written word, there are many illustrators and visual artists who are staunchly opposed to the use of AI. It’s quite understandable: their work conditions are similarly worsened by AI, when jobs don’t simply vanish when a client decides, for instance, to have a whole corporate identity generated by AI. But that’s not all: there’s also the question of plagiarism.

How can a machine plagiarise anything? To understand this, we have to make a little aside on how AI works. Fundamentally, these are probabilistic machines: an AI displays, segment by segment, the most likely follow up to a given prompt. How does it determine what is likely or not? By having digested humongous quantities of data, which it analyses by trial and error thanks to computing power that is every bit as humongous. In a way, AI is the applied version of the infinite monkey theorem, according to which if you leave a monkey press the keys of a typewriter at random for an infinite amount of time, it will statistically end up writing Hamlet. If every last one of the billion computing units making up ChatGPT are one of those monkeys, there’s no need to wait for an infinite amount of time: you can get Hamlet pretty fast.

And although Shakespeare isn’t around anymore to complain we pilfer his famous tragedy, it’s not the case for all the artists whose data were used to train AI. Artworks have thus been nearly entirely reproduced, down to the artists’ signature, without their agreement. The OpenAI executives have argued this wasn’t supposed to happen but it did because it is difficult to know exactly what data AI was has been trained on. In other cases, they bragged about it, as when the company behind ChatGPT published an update allowing users to generate images mimicking the style of Studio Ghibli. And this was a calculated move: if ChatGPT can copy the style of one of the household names in animation, famous for valuing human know-how above all, then it can copy anybody’s. Artists are no match for the machine, they seem to be saying.

“Look at my art” by Tragic Girls

So that is indeed plagiarism: using data acquired without the consent of their authors, ChatGPT generates images shamelessly copying their style. And the same goes for text: ChatGPT uses some in the public domain, but also copyrighted material, that could very well end up in an AI-generated translation. You think you’re saving time, and you end up potentially infringing copyright law. And if you don’t explicitly forbid the machine from gorging on your work, it will be used without any qualms.

AI is thus a poor tool that can plagiarise the work of others, and that unbeknownst to the user, because there is no transparency at all on what data is used to train it. A rather sorry picture. And we haven’t talked about its energy cost.

A bottomless pit

You might have come across this very worrying figure: every short conversation with ChatGPT would consume 0.5L of water. It is disputed, and it is indeed difficult to know precisely how much is consumed for every prompt sent to the AI. Maybe this figure needs to be put in perspective? Maybe. What doesn’t need any perspective, is that AI companies are having nuclear reactors restarted/built to power their gargantuan data centres. What doesn’t need any perspective, is that those data centers are often built in already dry areas, thereby worsening the droughts its inhabitants already suffer.

It is tempting to say that, although it takes a lot to build it all today, once the infrastructure is finished we’ll be able to enjoy AI’s “advances” with a clean conscience. But that would mean forgetting the death cult of the AI promoters. Those are indeed first and foremost snake oil salesmen: they willingly promise that AI will lead to incredible scientific progress, lower the cost of life for all, and that, in an event called the “singularity”, AI will become a superior conscious being that will then be able to solve all humanity’s problems.

3 Mile Island nuclear reactor (© Bradley C Bower/AP)

Maybe they believe in those promises, I can’t tell, of course. But it is way more likely that they are just a way to generate hype and raise capital to keep developing AI and, in so doing, to have OpenAI’s share price keep increasing. The next step is always a few million dollars ahead. And if you can fill the shareholders’ pockets trying to get there… well, there’s no harm in it, is there? As regards whether AI speculation will ever stop, I have no idea. What I do know is that the markets will always call for more growth, and thus for more energy consumption. Will the AI promoters act any different? I don’t believe so.

What is to be done?

As a conclusion, let’s go back to the beginning: no, I don’t and I don’t want to use AI for translation. Because it is a very poor tool, because it amounts to barely disguised plagiarism, and because it is an ecological disaster in the making which mainly exists to increase the profit margin of great technology companies.

That being said, it is absolutely not my intention to judge those who find themselves forced to use it, because their employer pushes post edition, for instance. Sometimes, you don’t have a choice: AI supremacy is so often presented as an irresistible future that many of our clients and bosses are fooled by it, more or less willingly. It is also a self-fulfilling prophecy: if a CEO is convinced that AI will replace their employees, they will terminate people to adapt to the coming of AI and… incredible! AI will have replaced their employees.

But for all the others, for all those who are not (yet) victims of AI-induced-unemployment, there is only one course of action: outright refusal to use this so-called tool. Polish up your talking points by reading on the topic. Every time you get the occasion, remind people of the limits and costs of the deathly project of generalised AI. In these lines, I only mentioned its effects on my job as a translator, but the consequences in other fields, such as education, are absolutely catastrophic. Everywhere, this sinister project must be fought every step of the way.

AI isn’t the future. It is one vision of the future, pushed by a handful of oligarchs for their personal enrichment at the expense of the rest of humanity. To paraphrase an excellent comic by Tom Humberstone: is this is our future, then we must sabotage it.

Tom Humberstone - I’m a Luddite (and so can you!)

But what it is you need, when you’re a translator? Let’s think:

• A remarkable keyboard. That is covered;

• A word processor;

• When you do game localization, a spreadsheet editor;

• More or less specialised dictionaries'

• A corrector software.

Word processor/spreadsheet editor

Given my core job is to produce huge quantities of text with a decent layout, having a wordprocessor is an obligation. Until recently, I used Microsoft Office 2016. It then stopped working following my last OS reinstall, and I thus gave in to the siren song of Microsoft 365 subscription. While I don’t really like the idea of a software subscription, it worked rather well. Of course, however, Microsoft decide to force all their users to use their horrendous AI assistant, Copilot, and for all manners of reasons which I well get into in another post, I won’t abide by that. Out with Word and Excel, thus; in with LibreOffice!

Without getting into the whole genealogy of the project, let’s just remember that LibreOffice is a free and open source software suite developed by the Document Foundation and supported by the Free Software Foundation. When I installed it, I feared the worst: the last time I’d tried LO was in the mid-2010s, back when it was rather… perfectible. But I was pleasantly surprised when I launched it: though the UI isn’t as slick as that of the latest Microsoft products, it’s very practical once you got your hands on it, and some keyboard shortcuts make way more sense.

Whether with regards to the wordprocessor or the spreadsheet editor, moving from MSOffice to LibreOffice was absolutely painless (once you get over some different design choices, like the different ways they handle text highlighting, for instance). LO is even faster on huge files (novels, many thousand lines-long spreadsheets), and I have had no file format compatibility issues. That was my main fear: not being able to collaborate with publishers using the change tracking and commenting tools of MSOffice. Thankfully, though: MSOffice can read comments in LO files, and vice-versa.

Of course, switching from the former to the latter will be less easy if you make a more advanced use of the suite (and use MSOffice’s online collaboration tools, for instance). But for an independent translator who just wants to write clean documents, this is perfectly viable. As an added bonus: no evil AI assistant to be seen. Perfect.

You can download the LibreOffice suite over here.

Dictionaries/corrector

I love dictionaries.

I could talk at length about the merits of all those in the picture (no, these aren’t only dictionaries, yes, they’re somewhat poorly-sorted, let go of me!), or even express my deep love of Roget’s Thesaurus (not pictured here), which is MUCH MORE than a simple dictionary of synonyms. I’ll just say that these are essential tools… which I don’t use that often because most of the time, the many online dictionaries are more than enough. A short list:

• Wordreference, a multilingual dictionary with a very active forum for asking difficult questions;

• The Trésor de la Langue informatisé, a French monolingual dictionary the writing of which stopped in 1994, which is an absolute… treasure, on etymology in particular;

• The fabulous Dictionnaire Électroniques des Synonymes, better known as the CRISCO (actually the name of the lab which created it). Simply the best dictionary of synonyms in French ;

• The online Robert, a monolingual French dictionary, maybe the one in which new words appear the fastest (with the notable exception of the wiktionary) ;

• The Cambridge English Dictionary, monolingual English dictionary, for British words (which I complement with the Oxford English Dictionary, the access to which is restricted);

• The Merriam Webster, a monolingual English dictionary, for American words.

To those should be added a couple more specific references:

• The Vitrine linguistique, a bilingual dictionary created by the Office québecois de la langue française, very useful for question of word use and technical vocabulary;

• The very useful Dictionnaire des cooccurrences (another Canadian reference), which tells me whether I really can use those two words together;

• The Online Etymology Dictionary, for the etymology of English words.

When I’m translating, I have all these dictionaries open in my browser. However, they were nearly replaced by the Swiss-army knife of the keypusher: Antidote.

Not only a very powerful piece of corrector software (which allows you to create personal dictionaries, to include new words in them and set a category for them so that they react like nouns or verbs, etc., which is very useful when you’re translating genre literature), Antidote also includes a swathe of dictionaries. Synonyms, antonyms, collocations, lexical fields, word families, rhymes, quotes… they’re all in there. It’s so convenient!

Maybe even too much, because at some point you find yourself trapped within this piece of software. Besides, Antidote doesn’t work well under Linux, it is run by yet another company wanting you to make a subscription (grrr), and they too want to force an AI rephrasing tool down your throat. Out with Antidote too, then.

It’s less easy to find a free alternative than for MSOffice. I haven’t found another bilingual corrector, but for French there is Grammalecte, which integrates with LibreOffice and is only a corrector, not trying to depose our beloved dictionaries.

You can download Grammalecte over here.

As a conclusion

It won’t come as a surprise to the open source advocates, but it is absolutely possible to be a professional translator working in a modicum of comfort for the astound sum of zero euros. (Which doesn’t preclude contributing to these volunteer-led projects, at least by making a donation to them. Always better to give money to them than to Microsoft.)

There are many other great free tools out there, and I’ll come back to those in another post. Until then, go try them!

Indeed, early this week, on January 20, the inauguration of Donald Trump happened, and the 47th President of the United States brought to the government far-right billionaire Elon Musk (who supports the AfD in Germany and does nazi salutes to “throw his heart to the crowd”). That’s why the HelloQuitX initiative, launched by members of the CNRS, has picked this very day to incite everyone to leave X, which Musk acquired in 2022. Now he’s part of the United States government, the billionaire answers even less to their justice department, and can freely manipulate the network’s algorithm to suit his sordid political ends. Indeed, under the guise of “freedom of speech”, X has been flooded by extreme speech and fake accounts that make it more or less unusable. Besides, for some people, remaining on X also means refusing to oppose Musk’s fascist turn. That is the reason why many famous media outlets decided to quit it.

Quitting X, then. Why not? But to go where?

One of the main draws of social networks is numbers: from a given critical mass, you’re more or less sure to find your audience. It could thus be a good idea to move to other great historical social media, like Facebook and Instagram, owned by Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s company. Sadly, he has also demonstrated how Trump-compatible he is. By announcing the end of diversity initiatives within Meta as well as all fact-checking measures, Zuckerberg aligns himself with the libertarian and “anti-woke” attitude dear to Musk and Trump. He too, then, rolls out the red carpet for the far-right.

But what should we do, then? And why leave? Each and every one of us should balance a few parameters: the actual use derived from a given network, the political positions of its owners and how much you can’t support them, and the impact it can have on your mental health. This last point shouldn’t be neglected: these companies have pushed us to scroll for the past fifteen years or so, and the effect it has on your attention span are well known. Personally, I’d already quit Facebook and X before January 20, mainly for these last reasons. But on the other hand, even though it’s not a social network, I still use Whatsapp (also owned by Meta) because it is my only way of remaining in touch with a number of friends. You always have to found the right compromise.

There are less politically problematic alternatives, which also don’t push you to watch ads or content you didn’t ask for. Bluesky, for instance, created by Twitter’s former CEO and building up to be the anti-X though it is still a private company, or Mastodon, an open source tool whose instantiated structure ensures a modicum of independence, though it is more compartmentalised. However, if the recent evolutions of the main social networks tells us one thing, it is how risky it is to depend on the whims of billionaires.

Indeed, when I quit Instagram a couple days ago, I realised that a number of accounts I followed over there (artists, publishers, etc.) had no other presence on the web. And so they’ve lost me because of this network’s owners. If this shows us one thing, it’s that we need to take back our data, our presence on the web, by having our own website, our own blog, self-hosted if possible. This can be daunting, but solutions exist, and you probably know someone who can help (hi to the one hosting me! You know who you are). What I’m saying is obvious for those who fight for our digital emancipation, like Framasoft. Step by step, we end up listening to them even though it’s not the easier way. Step by step.

So, you only need a website to self-promote? Not so sure. While we wait for a return to the decentralised web of yore, the compromise I’ve reached so far is to be (rarely) present on Bluesky, Mastodon, and LinkedIn, in order to keep up with the news (because many of my clients have accounts there) and to share my blog posts. And to get in touch with specific communities (of readers and game developers), I use Discord (yet another private company). In the end, whatever use you make of social networks, the most important is not to put all your eggs in one basket, and, as one Virginia Woolf 2.0 would probably say, to keep a web of one’s own.

• My first novel translation has been published! Le Dernier grand train d’Amérique by James Grady (This Train in English), with Rivages Noir. Critical reception has been… mixed, but this short paper over at Politis really grasped what I liked about the text. It feels strange, to see your work being critiqued.

• I’ve also translated my first comic: the third book in the Monte Cristo trilogy, by Jordan Mechner and Mario Alberti, over at Glénat.

• Several video games I’ve worked on have been released, in quite different genres: UFO 50, Derek Yu’s neoclassical game compilation, as well as Mythwrecked, an action-adventure game revisiting a shipwrecked pantheon. Each game had its own specific constraints and it was a pleasure to work on them.

• Skira keeps entrusting me with beautiful projects: this book on Peter Halley’s neo-geo art, and this one, dedicated to the meticulous work of Chiharu Shiota (whose art is currently being exhibited at the Grand Palais in Paris).

• From a less directly textual perspective, I was elected secretary of the ATLF (the Association for Literary Translators in France), and I gave a couple of presentations to explain what literary translation is and what the ATLF is and does. Hard not think about this scene from Starship Troopers when I talked to students.

Besides, and as always for both the publishing and video game industries, most of my professional happens offscreen. All I can say for now is that in 2025, two more novels I’ve translated should be published, as well as a videogame triptych that represents an extremely fun challenge.

There will surely be more texts, and maybe this blog will see somewhat more regular activity (fingers crossed!). I’d like to write about what I read, and finally take the time to write about my current translations.

While we wait for these hypothetical future posts, I’d like to wish you as good a 2025 as possible. Best of luck for whatever you fight for, and for everything you undertake.

If you’re roughly my age (almost forty, God how time flies), you probably remember a time when this hobby was reviled and the object of media scares that were as justified as they were rational (i.e. not at all). But today, geek culture has become cool (and is a huge market) and thus playing role-playing games, which you could describe as telling more or less structured collaborative stories around a table (or over the internet), is no longer taboo. Spearheading this new-found popularity is a household name owned by financial mammoth Hasbro, Dungeons & Dragons, which has become synonymous with role-playing games for many (thanks to that Stranger Things episode amongst other things).

Stranger Things, season 1, episode 1. Aren’t nerds cool?

However, equating Dungeons & Dragons and role-playing games is a bit like saying the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become synonymous with cinema as a whole. It is a very popular version of it (with its pros and cons), but it is not the only one. Just like not all films include superheroes, very costly special effects and loads of in-jokes, not all role-playing games include a game master, way-too-many-sided dice, or a fantasy universe. There is a huge variety of RPG worlds (from the very realistic to the very weird), there are the ones with very complex rules or the ones with very minimal rulesets, and there are also ones in which narration is led by one person and others in which everyone co-creates the narration. In a word, as I said above, it is bountiful, and very exciting.

And now I tell you about my latest translation: Night of the Hogmen (La Nuit des Porcs-Vivants in French). Created by Marsh Davies and Jim Rossignol, this short scenario lets you play travellers who, during a dark and stormy night in the north of 18th-century England, have a coach accident and have to flee a horde of porcine monsters. Where have these monsters come from, you ask? Some say they’re the result of a magical cataclysm that hit the area a few years before and created a zone in which mysterious and unnatural things happen. If you would like to know more, you should play TEETH, their first full game, released in 2023, the grotesquely fun and horrific atmosphere of which could be described as Jane Austen’s STALKER by way of The Witcher.

A very alluring proposal, then, but one that was only available in English, which, as I’m sure you’ll agree, was a bit of a shame. I thus took hold of my finest quill my fantastic keyboard and, with the help of its creators, I translated the introductory scenario of this unique universe: my translation is available over on their page.

Even if you’ve never played a role-playing game, this short booklet contains everything you need to spend a delicious night with fellow lovers of horrific stories. If you enjoy the setting and you’re fluent in English (which you probably are, since you’re reading this), I once again heartily recommend diving headfirst into TEETH. And if you want more and happen not to be insensitive to the call of the open sea, their next project, GOLD TEETH, transports this grotesque and occult spirit in… the Caribbean! Which results, if they’re to be believed, in “Monty Python’s Master and Commander as depicted by Hyeronimus Bosch”. How to resist? Well, don’t… go and back their project on Kickstarter…

As for me, it would seem I have a few grotesque pages left to translate. Farewell, then! Here’s hoping I’m still myself next time…

• I’ve translated my first comic book! Book 3 of Jordan Mechner and Mario Alberti’s Monte Cristo trilogy. It was very interesting to work on it because of the visual context and space constraints it entails, both of which reminded me of my daily video games localization jobs.

• I’ve become the secretary of the ATLF (Association of French Literary Translators), in which I do my best to try and better our collective working conditions. And I work with amazing people!

• I’ve finished my second novel translation, but I can’t talk about it.

• I’m working on my third novel translation, but I can’t talk about it.

• I’ve translated or contributed to the translation of several video game projects, but I can’t talk about it.

At this point, I might as well be a spy.

But I’ll tell you more about it all very soon! (For real this time.)

• Word-processing software

• Dictionaries (monolingual, bilingual, technical, synonyms, slang, swear words, onomatopoeia… ALL the dictionaries)

• Spellchecking software

• Reference books (glossaries, manuals, etc.)

• An online encyclopedia

• CAT tools?

• Generative artificial intelligence (Why not? Read this.)

I already have all this and use it regularly. Is that everything, though? No! I’m forgetting the most fundamental of them all, and eagle-eyed readers who appreciate my subtle talent for image editing have already guessed what it is: the keyboard. (Because I’m indeed not translating with a pen, finding it dangerously deprived of any backup function.)

The keyboard, then. But not just any keyboard.

There are many different types of keyboards: small and big, membrane and mechanical, plain ones and others resembling Christmas trees. But I’m not so much interested in these (fantastic) objects as in the layout of their keys. You probably know the two most famous: QWERTY, patented in 1878, took keys out of the alphabetical order to prevent the clashing of typebars; AZERTY, a few years later, adapted this approach to the French language.

There are many more, but I’d like to talk about one of them in particular; a comparatively recent project (it started in 2008), which absolutely suits my use: the qwerty-fr. See for yourself.

The first thing you’ll notice on this picture (besides a splendid mug and the need for some dusting) is the great many symbols featured on this keyboard. And that is one of the key strengths of qwerty-fr: having all these characters at your fingertips. Who needs all this? Well, me, but maybe you too. Let me explain.

I divide my time between translating for publishing (novels etc.) and for video games. In practice, that means that I’m either working in a word-processor or in a spreadsheet editor (such as Excel). If the former automatically replaces the straight quotation marks (") with the French ones (« »), the latter doesn’t. To write dialogue in French, I thus had either to copy these symbols from another text, or to use ascii codes. This method consists in holding the alt key while you type a number combination on the numpad (alt + 174 is «, for instance). Although reliable, this 1/ takes time and 2/ means you need a numpad (which is rarely featured on a laptop).

With qwerty-fr, no need to remember a huge list of combinations anymore, everything is close at hand. You can easily type all the special characters used in French. And it doesn’t stop here!

If you take another look at the picture of my keyboard above, you’ll notice that there are many other symbols: mathematical ones (≠ ≈ ≤ ≥), ligatures (œ Œ æ Æ), typographical symbols such as the em- (—) and en-dash (–), a wide array of diacritics (symbols changing the way a letter is pronounced, such as accents, cedillas, umlauts, overrings, etc.), and many more. Thanks to the clever use of the modifier keys, shift and alt gr, you can thus type in most of the languages using the Latin alphabet. And that’s exhilarating! Even if you don’t need all these symbols on a daily basis, the mere idea of having access to them all makes you want to explore and discover all these linguistic worlds.

Of course, however, there’s a learning curve. As the name implies, this layout is based on QWERTY, and if you’ve always used an AZERTY (or other) keyboard, you’ll need time to find your bearings. It took me a few weeks, but it quickly becomes second nature. And the typographical freedom it gives you is well worth spending a little while looking up how to type this or that character.

If your job or hobby involves typing and regularly switching languages (using the Latin alphabet only, mind), I cannot recommend trying the qwerty-fr enough. You can do so online on the qwerty-fr website. It is very easily installed on Windows, Mac and Linux. And you don’t even need a new keyboard!

Neither do you need to have one custom-built, and to make a silly video showing how amazing it is.

And yet.

Here it is, at last! The first novel I’ve ever translated is released today. Which means you’ll be able to go to a real bookshop, to open a real book and to find my very own name on both the title page AND the back cover — and potentially buy it with real money, but that is up to you. It might not mean much to you, but I can’t stop being amazed at this having become my job. Almost two years ago to the day, Rivages Noir asked me to try my hand at translating this book I had read for them, and today… it actually exists, and has the beautiful cover you can see above.

But what is it all about? Le dernier grand train d’Amérique (original title: This Train) is the latest book by James Grady, the American author made famous in 1974 with Six Days of the Condor. In it, you’ll follow the intertwined fates of the passengers of the Empire Builder, a train going from Seattle to Chicago in only 47 hours. This trip is supposed to be dedicated to rest and to the contemplation of the magnificent landscapes of northwestern America, but it’ll end up being quite the opposite. Because everyone came onboard with their own secrets, doubts and more or less guilty plans.

This Train is a thriller on rails with many characters, and it tries to draw a picture of today’s America by showing it through the eyes of all these passengers who are so different, be it in terms of age, race, class, gender. Grady switches effortlessly from one to the other and gives each of them their own voice. But aside from being a snapshot of this country, it’s also a very well-paced thriller: Grady keeps you on your toes with his raw and rhythmic writing, which gave quite a hard time, and you’ll only find release once you close the book.

As you probably understood, I already loved this book when I read it in English. I hope you will find everything I described above in the French version. In a future post, I’ll go over some of the very interesting problems I had when translating it. Until then, happy reading!

James Grady, Le dernier grand train d’Amérique, (Édition Payot & Rivages, collection Rivages Noir), 400 pages.

• Stop apologising for not writing more.

• Write more.

That should work.

But to the matter at hand. Speaking of writing, and publishing, I can finally announce the upcoming release of my first translation: Le dernier grand train d’Amérique, by James Grady (originally published in 2022 with a very sober title: This Train).

Not the French cover.

Grady has written more than fifteen novels, and made a name for himself with the very first one in 1974: The Six Days of the Condor. The following year, it was adapted for the silver screen as The Three Days of the Condor (yet another example of the strange maths ruling over titles). It was a resounding success, thanks to Sydney Pollack’s direction and to great acting by Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway.

Since that first novel, Grady has been improving his craft, and he takes us aboard This Train at the gripping pace he is famous for. In this pressure cooker on rails, he constantly switches between the points of view of colourful characters who give us as many different perspectives on today’s America.

It will be published in France on 6 March 2024 by the éditions Payot & Rivages, and I can’t wait to get feedback from the readers. I’ll talk more about it then.

Évènement organisé par et pour des passionnés, AdventureX réunit chaque année depuis 2011 les grands noms de la narration vidéoludique pour des conférences portant sur des thèmes variés. Parmi celles auxquelles j’ai assisté cette année, il y en eut ainsi par exemple sur l’utilisation de l’Histoire comme source d’inspiration créatrice (Sagar Beroshi), la représentation des affections médicales en jeu vidéo (Marina Sciberras) ou encore les façons dont il est possible de mettre en jeu le réel tout en lui rendant justice (Chella Ramanan). À chaque fois, j’en suis ressorti avec beaucoup trop de notes, et un regard nouveau sur les choses.

Mais AdventureX, ce n’est pas simplement une conférence : c’est un salon avec de nombreux jeux en exposition. J’y ai fait de très belles découvertes, comme Underground Blossom (du studio Rusty Lake), auquel je me suis arraché à grand-peine, ou encore Windrush Tales. Ce dernier s’emploie à raconter l’histoire sensible de la génération Windrush, ces Afro-caribbéens arrivés en Grande-Bretagne dans l’après-guerre pour reconstruire un pays qui ne leur réserva pas l’accueil qu’ils méritaient. Contrairement à ce qui se fait dans de plus grands évènements, je n’ai pas uniquement essayé ces jeux et écouté un discours marketing : j’ai pu longuement discuter avec leurs auteurs et développeurs. Si leur fatigue était manifeste (certains venant de loin), ils étaient tous aussi passionnées que passionnantes.

Et puisque nous sommes en Angleterre, ces journées déjà denses se terminaient évidemment au pub, où on pouvait poursuivre les conversations entamées plus tôt. Quand on est tellement occupé à discuter qu’on en oublie de donner des cartes de visite (je suis très doué pour le réseau), c’est plutôt bon signe.

En résumé, ma première fois à AdventureX fut un franc succès : des conférences intéressantes, des participants passionnés et très accueillants et des jeux dont j’attends la sortie avec impatience. Le tout présenté par le débonnaire Alasdair Beckett-King, dont je vous invite à consulter la chaîne Youtube si vous avez envie de rire (en anglais). Toutes les conférences des années précédentes sont par ailleurs disponibles sur la chaîne d’AdventureX (en anglais) ; celles de cette année ne devaient pas tarder a être mises en ligne. De quoi patienter en attendant l’édition 2024, à laquelle je ne manquerai pas d’aller ! Vivement !

On y retrouve même de vieilles connaissances…

1/ I’ve handed in my very first novel translation! I can’t say anything about it, which is horribly frustrating (see picture below), but I’m happy with my work. Now, I’m waiting for the publisher’s feedback. And I’m… not entirely relaxed about it.

2/ My other big project, a video game, now has a release date! Under the Waves (Parallel Studio) releases on 29 August 2023, and I can’t wait to hear the texts I’ve translated voiced by the various actors and actresses. Here, too, I’ll have to be patient.

3/ Since February, I’ve been working for Jordan Mechner. Yes, THE Jordan Mechner, who created Prince of Persia in 1989, that is the very first video game I’ve ever played. I was thus extremely proud to translate the annex to his fantastic autobiographical graphic novel, Replay (Delcourt, 2023). As funny as it is touching, this tale will be enjoyed by those who find interesting the links between History and our personal stories. If you want to know more about its creation, you can find the annex here.

Learn more about it on Jordan’s website.

4/ My work for the éditions Skira is turning into a regular collaboration. After contributing to a splendid book on photographer Michael Kenna last year, I’ve translated two articles for the catalogue of the exhibition entitled “Leonardo Da Vinci and Anatomy, the Mechanics of Life”, running from 9 June to 17 September at the Clos Lucé. I’m not sure if I’ll some day get used to receiving free author copies, but for the moment it hasn’t ceased to amaze me.

You can order it from here.

And that’s it for today! I’ve been busy since the beginning of this year, which is often good news as a freelancer, but I’ll try not to get buried in the job; my goal: writing more than a single post every six months. Fingers crossed!

It’s been three months since I’ve finished this book, and I only bring myself to write this post today. I am awed by it. Not that it is unapproachable, like some of the great translation classics (Benjamin’s “The Translator’s Task”, for instance). On the contrary, Grunenwald’s essay is written in a quite simple, even welcoming language. But it is certainly not without depth, and it is doing something important. This short post will surely not do it justice, but I hope you’ll come out of it wanting to take a look at this book.

Many theoretical essays on translation are articulated to works of translation, their practical counterparts: Benjamin’s essay was thus the preface to his translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens. In many cases however, I find that, when faced with a theoretical text presented alongside the result of a specific practice of translation, I have a hard time linking theory and practice. It is definitely not the case here. Throughout the whole essay, Grunenwald associates thought and doing. What better example of it than her chapter headings, which are as many verbs pointing to a specific aspect of what translating is: abandoning oneself, improvising, submitting oneself, decentring (oneself), interpreting, correcting, widening, including?, learning, weaving, citing. [s’abandonner, improviser, se soumettre, (se) décentrer, interpréter, corriger, élargir, inclure ?, apprendre, tisser, citer.]

Translating is all that. Even before putting pen to paper, it is creating the material conditions of a translation by improvising and doing odd jobs. It is interpreting a text and making its author reflect upon the gender of “thinkers” in French, and making her text more precise by confronting it with another language. It is including by wondering what image you want to conjure when you translate “workers”: the manly union camaraderie of “travailleurs”, or a more exact view of history, in this specific case, of “travailleuses”. It is learning to find the right neologisms, getting things wrong sometimes, but always being willing to start over. It is citing, because one should never forget that translation is a collective practice. And it’s also, quite often, researching a bunch of things on Google or on the CRISCO’s dictionary of synonyms, trivial acts Grunenwald nevertheless featured in her essay because that too, when translating, constitutes your daily life.

Sur les bouts de la langue is a very intimate text, reminding us that translators are people who have a lived history. It’s also a very humble text: “No need for much talent, or for any particular inspiration, says Grunenwald. Only a few techniques of literary manipulation.” (p. 150) But it isn’t an apologetic text. Rather a militant one, telling us that Translating as a feminist doesn’t mean writing a new handbook, or creating new inclusive writing norms that will soon be appropriated by the dominant class to start excluding again. It means staying “constantly on the move, and fostering unease.” (p. 100)

There’s a lot more to say on this book: on how Grunenwald articulates the personal and the political, theory and practice, life and translation. On the richness of its bibliography, and how the author applies all she has learned from it. But I need more time to understand it, to process it. I’ll limit myself to concluding by saying that everyone should read it. It’s a text that’s made me want to read better, to think, to work better. Which reminded me of the beauty, the difficulty and the importance of this job. And which I won’t stop reading anytime soon, as long as I’ll be translating.

I wasn’t lucky enough to translate SGJ’s work. However, when I attended a conference he gave at the America book festival in Vincennes, near Paris, I was lucky enough to act as his interpreter for an interview with a crime fiction blog called Nyctalopes. Stephen proved to be both a very nice and interesting fellow in person and so, despite having spent more than enough on books for the month, I gave in to literary temptation and bought Galeux (La Volte, 2020), the French translation of Mongrels and his only other novel available in that language. I gobbled up this werewolf story, and I would like to take a quick look at a short passage of Mathilde Montier’s excellent translation. Be careful then, some minor spoilers below.

Look at these beauties!

But first, some context: Darren, the teenage narrator, is here talking about werewolf/human hybrids which are abominations according to the werewolf tradition. Here is the original description in English:

Darren said that Grandpa’s name for them was Sad Eyes, but I’d always thought he heard wrong. They’re supposed to have these human-looking eyes, but “Sad Eyes” feels like a corruption of something Arabic. Like they’ve known these animals over there as well. If they are even animals.

And here is Mathilde Montier’s French translation:

Grandpa les appelait apparemment des Maussades, mais j’ai toujours été persuadé que Darren avait mal entendu. Ils avaient beau avoir ces yeux à l’expression si humaine, ce nom sonnait à mon oreille comme une corruption de l’hébreu. À croire qu’on connaissait aussi ces animaux, là-bas. Si on peut parler d’animaux.

I don’t think “Sad Eyes” points to any specific word in Arabic. But even if it were the case, you would be hard put to find a nickname for these hybrids that would sound close in French (the /ɑɪz/ ending being non-existent in French). Rather than translating this bit out, Montier has had an idea for a semantic shift that is very clever in several ways.

First, by replacing Arabic with Hebrew, she keeps a Semitic language, and thus the perceived distance from the daily life of an American teenager. Then, “Maussade”, which could translate as “sullen”, keeps the idea of sadness pertaining to the tragic condition of these hunted hybrids. Finally, this word is an homophone of the Hebrew “Mossad”, shorthand for the Israeli special forces which the reader might have encountered before. In a way, the Middle-East is referred to in an even clearer way than in the original, which is almost improved upon.

I love these excerpts you pay little attention to when reading, but which must have been a bona fide translation problem. I’m willing to bet that Montier pulled her hair out at least for a bit before she finally found her (very elegant) solution. Kudos to her!

As for you, go read yourself some Stephen Graham Jones if you haven’t already. In English, in French, doesn’t matter as long as you do.

First, and most importantly: I love this job. Despite the rhythm changes (some weeks are packed, others utterly chill), the uncertainty (switching from a reliable teacher job to “hmm, how much am I going to earn next month?”), and a financial downturn (caviar days are over!), I wouldn’t go back for all the gold in the world. Getting up in the morning with no more serious professional issues (apart from having my invoices paid…) than finding how to translate such and such particularly tricky phrase… it’s pure joy. At least it is to me.

Secondly, and quite importantly: I’ve had more than enough work. After a lull which lasted from October to December 2021, during which nobody seemed to need my services (except from actezéro, thanks to them, I’ll come back to that), I was lucky enough to be hired by the Warlocs, a collective of game localisers. Since then, probably because the more you work, the more you work, I’ve had my hands full. Here are the main projects I’ve worked on:

Tombstar (Steam, with the Warlocs), a twin stick shooter with rogue-like elements, in a space-western absurd setting. Many stupid puns, and a very funny game I’ve translated in collaboration with Killian Nari.

Lord Winklebottom Investigates (Steam, with the Warlocs), a point’n’click in which a giraffe and an hippo troublingly reminiscent of Sherlock & Watson investigate the death of an axolotl. A very weird and resolutely British tone that I quite liked. I’ve only translated a part of it, the rest having been done by Christophe Pallarès, a.k.a. “boss” (he loves when I call him that).

Sunshine Manor (Steam, with the Warlocs), a horrific hommage to 8-bit Japanese RPGs, in which you explore a haunted manor and try to help its denizens. A nostalgic trip for those who love pixelated horror.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCN5sQHaRGg

Under the Waves (Steam, for actezéro), a submarine narrative adventure game developed by the French of Parallel Studio, with actezéro at the narrative helm. They entrusted me with translating Rik Godwin’s prose, and let’s just say I cannot wait for you to get your hands on the game (not before 2023, as far as I know).

Outside of localisation work, I’ve also translated the preface of a book on Michael Kenna’s tree photographs, to be published by Skira. It’s allowed me to discover the fabulous work of an artist I only knew by name. I’ve also translated the subtitles for two short documentaries featured in the next exhibition at the EPFL, Cosmos Archeology (16.9.2022–5.2.2023).

Last but not least, and it might not for you but it means a lot to me: I was hired to translate my first novel! I can’t say much more than that, except that it’ll be published by Payot & Rivages, and more precisely by Rivages Noir since it is crime fiction… Which means that someday, in bookshops, there’ll be a book in which you’ll be able to read “Translated by Clément Martin”… which is crazy.

Clément Martin… hereafter named “the translator”. Crazy.

To wrap it all up, I feel infinitely lucky, and I’m starting this new (school) year with a lot of enthusiasm for all the projects to come — and with a book to translate! What a life.
Who would’ve thought?

https://warlocs.com/

First, a bit of context: last January, Warlocs, an independent collective of translators, were kind enough to entrust me with the translation of Not Tonight 2. In this game, you play three friends travelling across dystopian United States to save a fourth one who was captured by a group of quasi-Trumpian extremists. To fund their journey, they work as bouncers: the core gameplay is time-limited document verification, inspired by the most excellent Papers, Please.

So I enthusiastically dived in the pages… or rather the files. As usual in this field, some 70000 words were sent to me as spreadsheets, where each line can represent a bit of the interface, a narration paragraph, a dialogue line, etc. It is a bit daunting at first, but you get used to it. During the translation, I encountered three main difficulties that were specific to localisation.

So I heard you like words?

First, the character limits. The expansion rate, well-known to book publishers, must be watched very closely when localising. For instance, a book in English usually grows by 10 to 20% when translated into French. Although it is acceptable for dialogue lines, it can be absolutely impossible for UI elements which have only limited space (see for example how many letters there are in the French translations of “run”). That’s why in the picture above, there are three columns on the right side which I use to count the number of characters in English, in French, and the expansion rate, which turns red when it goes above 10%. I was always watching it when translating.

Next, the problems with spreadsheets themselves. Translating a text is usually quite linear, but it’s not necessarily the case here: the authors’ texts, often written with other tools, may appear in an arbitrary order once converted to spreadsheet format. Some dialogues must then be translated out of order, which makes any form of consistency and flow hard to achieve. Another issue: the identifiers of each line (Who is speaking? In what scene?) can lack clarity or contain errors, which means you have to be extra watchful. Thankfully, the developers had given us a beta version of the game to help us evaluate the context of each line, but it is a luxury that most localisers are not given.

Finally, you can’t always translate everything. Although the spreadsheets contain most of the game’s texts, it’s sometimes not the case for words appearing in background pictures. Let’s take an example from Not Tonight 2: there is a cult called “the Creed cult”, which you could translate by “la secte du crédo” (“crédo” is “creed” in French). However, the word “Creed” was present in the level background, and not translatable, so I’ve had to keep it and work around it. My translation then became “la secte Creed”, while its members, the “Creedsmen” in the original, became… “les Creediens”. I like this translation because it has religious overtones — “Creediens” sounds like Chrétien (=Christian) in French — but I might not have used it if I could have translated everything.

There are ways to prepare all the game’s elements for them to be translatable (this process is known as internationalisation, or i18n — i + 18 letters + n — can’t get enough of this). It is not always possible, however, or even desirable, and it can represent an unwelcome cost for a small studio.

Me after several weeks’ work.

Localisation implies quite a few more constraints: one among these (which I didn’t have to deal with in this case) is translating lines that will be recorded by actors, which entails all sorts of problems that audiovisual translators know well. In the end, although all these parameters sometimes feel like you were given an impossible mission, localisation is a fascinating job, and one I really love. I will have more occasions to write about it, and to dive deeper, because I will work with the Warlocs on several more projects. In any case, if these few words allowed you to have a quick look behind the scenes, be sure to be indulgent next time a localisation seems a bit off: the translator has surely done everything they could!

What’s the goal, you say? To reveal the truths and entities hidden behind the words by doing all sorts of things to a paperback: blacking out some words, cutting out some others, introducing new characters in the margins themselves, burning and other unholy treatments. Translating it was very fun: recreating the layout was tricky (the original having been scissored & glued together), but the main challenge was to render the vaguely ominous tone of the English version.

Disclaimer: I had lots of fun translating this, but I still haven’t brought myself to play it… Maybe you’ll be braver than I have been! You will find my French translation here and the original there.

I’ll start then with the translation I’ve worked on for my Master’s degree: The Breath of the Sun (Aqueduct Press, 2018), by Isaac Fellman. There were several difficult aspects to this book, and I wasn’t sure which part to present here. The short-lived (and dishonest) crusade against the French neutral pronoun “iel” (which you can read about here) helped me decide, since I did use the infamous pronoun in my translation.

First, some context: the narrator, Lamat, has recently met Disaine, a scientist and former priestess. Disaine wants to hire Lamat as a guide to climb the mountain sitting atop of their world, the top of which, legend has it, goes beyond the stratosphere. Lamat belongs to the Holoh people: this mountain is a god to them, and they can’t climb it without respecting some complex ceremonies. Disaine implies that Lamat hasn’t had much trouble breaking her people’s taboos.

Here is her answer:

The original (p. 14):

“It wasn’t that,” I said, and looked over the basket at the side of the mountain, with its billion footholds in the snow. Snow on God’s body, dry and fine. “It wasn’t easy to break at all. But I thought — and I still think, even though it was such a disaster, even though people died and marriages ended…”
“Yes?”
“I grew up being told that God doesn’t want us to climb. That we wound Them with our feet, that we blood Them with our fingernails. And that I’m not sure it’s true. The Holoh are the only people who are visible to God. Why would They choose us, if not so that we could someday see Them face to face?”

My translation:

– Ce n’est pas ça », ai-je répondu en regardant, derrière la nacelle, la montagne et ses milliards de points d’appui dans la neige. De la neige sur le corps de Dieu, sèche et fine. « Ça n’a pas été facile du tout. Mais je me suis dit – et je me dis encore, malgré le désastre, même s’il y a eu des morts et des mariages brisés…
– Oui ?
– On m’a toujours dit que Dieu ne voulait pas qu’on grimpe. Que nos pieds Læ blessaient, que nos ongles L’écorchaient. Et je ne suis pas sûre que ce soit vrai. Les Holohs sont le seul peuple visible aux yeux de Dieu. Pourquoi nous choisirait-Iel, sinon pour que nous puissions un jour Læ voir en face ? »

Lamat uses the singular “They” to talk about God/the mountain, and the capital T reinforces the divine character of that being. Her using it is all the more interesting since Disaine uses “He”, the male singular pronoun, to talk about that same god. Theological discussions are frequent in the book, and it is important to render them in all their nuances. There is thus no way I could neutralise this difference in French and have both characters use the masculine singular pronoun il, all the more since gender is a central theme of the book.

At this stage, the translator worries. How are you supposed to translate this, in a language supposedly so hostile to gender-neutral terms? If using the singular they is perfectly appropriate in English (since at least 1375, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us), French is sorely lacking in the neutral pronoun department… at least that’s what I thought. Further research in the matter brought me to iel, of course, but I’ve also encountered ael, al, el, ol, ul, yel and even ille. Some of these are regionalisms, some already existing in Middle or Old French while some others are more recent creations, but there are many possibilities.

The use of the singular they is so old that it was first written þei ! Yes, it is actually older than the famous th which has caused so many pains to French students.

However, these are pronouns that few French readers are used to encountering. My translation would then automatically feel unfamiliar in a way that the original doesn’t, which is why I decided to use “iel” so as to make that discomfort minimal: a French reader understands it is a mix of il and elle, and it sounds common enough in French to not sound too alien.

That being settled, I still had to deal with “Them”. Again, the translator worries. It would indeed be regrettable to use the gender-neutral pronoun iel only to then pick the gendered objet pronouns le or la which would bring back Lamat’s neutral god to a male or female gender. More research led to more discoveries: I had at my disposal object pronouns such as Lo, Lea, Lu or even Lae. Lamat’s people feeling tradition-oriented and speaking a language that is somewhat archaic, I opted for using Lae and adding a ligature to get Læ (rather rare in French, tied letters mainly appear in borrowings from Latin, which gives this pronoun a more historical feel).

This aren’t necessarily pronouns I use on a daily basis. I seldom read them, and hear them even less frequently, but I felt they would be the most appropriate option for this text. Of course, a reader who has never come across them will probably stumble at first: they will wonder briefly what iel is referring to, how to pronounce læ… But they will also perceive another aspect of what differentiates the two main characters, and it is my hope that they will understand better the book and its world because of this decision.