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please help me translate from English into French
I'd be grateful if someone could help me assure that the Paris hotel room I am about to book does have two beds.
When I inquired, online, about the availability of this hotel I did specify in English that I was only interested in a room with twin beds. The email reply from the hotel, in English , confirms there is a double OR a twin room available for the nights I need. Would someone please translate into French the following : I would like to book a twin room only. I will add the translated sentence to my reply to the hotel. |
Sorry I'm no help in French, but I would use the words TWO BEDS rather than words like single, double, twin, etc. That will be the most clear in either language.
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Warning: my French is not good.
Je voudrais faire une reservation pour une chambre avec deux lits. (I'd like to make a reservation for a room with two beds.) S'il n'est pas possible, veuillez m'ecrire. (If this is not possible, please write me. Ecrire has an accent on the e, but I don't know how to do that here. The "'" comes from a contraction of the pronoun me + ecrire.) |
You might also try an online translation service www.paralink.com. It seems to be working slowly this morning ...
In the past, it's been helpful to me in a similar France reservation situation. I'm glad you're trying to communicate in French. |
Try this site, http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr, then cut and paste to your email.
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To get characters with accents, you can use the character map, which (on Windows machines) should be somewhere off your accessories menu. It will show the keys to press, e.g, ALT+0233 (or sometimes CTRL+ALT+E) gives you é, ALT+0232 gives you è, ALT+0224 gives you à (and you can hazard a guess at the others since they're fairly close together in the list.)
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Great.
So veuillez m'écrire (please write me). |
The phrase for a twin-bedded room is "une chambre à deux lits", which literally means "a room with two beds". That's pretty unambiguous. A simple complete sentence would be "Nous voudrions une chambre à deux lits" ("We would like a room with two beds"), or if you want to say it more strongly, "Nous exigeons une chambre à deux lits" ("We require a room with two beds").
To create the "à", hold down the <Alt> key, and while holding it down, enter "133" ON THE NUMERIC KEYPAD (NOT on the numbers above the letters), and then release the <Alt>. I'd be careful about the use of the word "twin" in English, which could be misinterpreted. A "twin bed" in English is just a single bed, but if I were a non-English speaker, I'd be inclined to interpret it as meaning a double bed (since, after all, twins are two people). My wife and I have this same issue. After sleeping for decades on a "King-size" bed, we can no longer sleep comfortably on a standard US "double" bed. Thus we ask for either at least a queen-sized bed, or separate beds. The trouble is, "Queen Size" is a US designation. So I sometimes actually send a little table of bed sizes: Twin 99 cm wide Queen 152 cm wide King 193 cm wide The sizes in France that roughly correspond to Queen and King seem to be 160 and 180 cm respectively. Finally, I would never recommend using automated translation services to translate into a foreign language. Try using them to translate a bunch of French web pages into English, and see what you get. The result is often completely unintelligible. You'd be better off writing in English, which most hotel people can either understand themselves, or have someone help them with it. At least the proper meaning is contained in the English, and they have only to extract it. If you send them a bad French translation, the meaning may have already been lost, and they have no hope. Automated translation was a major failure of computer science as far back as the 1950's, and it hasn't made much progress since. You can't really successfully translate something if you don't understand it, and computers don't understand it. - Larry |
Larry/justretired has the right answer. To emphasize that this is the only kind of room you want, add the word "seulement" to the end of Larry's suggested full sentence. (It means "only" and it could hardly be misinterpreted.) Good luck.
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I found a file on entering accented character in Windows based systems:
On Windows systems, there actually are two slightly different ways of getting each accented character. These work in all programs. In each case, hold down the <Alt> key, and while holding it down, type either the three-digit code or the four-digit code shown in the table below on the numeric keypad, and then release the <Alt> key. Actually, all the four-digit codes start with zero, but the zero must be typed for those codes. The three digits after a zero are interpreted differently than three digits without a zero. It is important to use the numeric keypad, not the numbers in the top row above the letter keys. I think the three-digit codes come from the extended character set of the original IBM PC, and the four-digit codes come from the newer "ISO" character set used by Windows. For some strange reason, there is not a four-digit version of the lower-case c with a cedilla. If you copy the table below, paste it somewhere, and change to a fixed-width font such as "Courier New", the table elements will roughly line up (except Fodors seems to delete multiple spaces). à 133 0224 á 160 0225 â 131 0226 ä 132 0228 è 138 0232 é 130 0233 ê 136 0234 ë 137 0235 ì 141 0236 í 161 0237 î 140 0238 ï 139 0239 ò 149 0242 ó 162 0243 ô 147 0244 ö 148 0246 ù 151 0249 ú 163 0250 û 150 0244 ü 129 0252 ç 135 Ç 128 0199 ñ 164 0241 Ñ 165 0209 ? 168 0191 ! 173 0209 I tried looking up the "character map" in Windows Help, but couldn't find it. As a general rule, I find Help from Microsoft to be useless. They keep changing the names of things. For instance, in Windows XP, they now use "My Network Places" for what they used to call "Network Neighborhood". They then remove the older name from their Help files, so you can't find it. And you don't know the new name, so you can't find it either. Then the Help function doesn't look up multi-word phrases, which is utterly primitive. If you enter "Network Neighborhood", it's interpreted as "Network" OR "Neighborhood". But Microsoft always names things with multiword phrases, like "My Network Places". I've never seen any other major software manufacturer with a search function as horrible as Microsoft's. - Larry |
Larry has some good advice. I would like to discourage you from using "exigeons" however. That comes off more like "We demand" than "We require".
Here is how I would say " I would like to book a twin room only." Un lit etant unsuffisant, Je souhaiterait reserver une chambre avec deux lits separes. Literally translated that says : One bed being insufficient, I would like to reserve a room with two separate beds. |
Ignore the sentence in my last post. Somehow I pasted it before I corrected it. Here is the correct sentence:
Un lit étant insuffisant, Je souhaiterais réserver une chambre avec deux lits sépare. |
Thank you for your replies,
111op, I went with most of your translation. Richard, I was familiar with bablefish, but I sometimes have to smile at the English/Spanish translations that pop up there, they have a tendency to be creative. :-) I assumed the English/French translations could be just as creative. So that's why I inquired if someone here spoke French. Heather, I hadn't known about paralink, but even after I installed the plug-in , I couldn't get a translation to appear in the textbox. I will try again in the future though. Patrick,thanks for the heads up on the character map. In the end I plugged 111op's translation into bablefish and made a couple of modifications according to bable's suggestions. This is what I added to my email to the hotel : Je voudrais faire une réservation pour une chambre avec deux lits. Veuillez m'écrire si cette chambre est disponible. I hope I have requested a room with two beds, or I have I promised to to change the linens on two beds.? ;-) |
The die was cast, some of you were posting whilst I was composing..I didn't see your answers until I had already sent my email off to the hotel. :-(
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Reg."exigeons" = demand, I was going to say this even though I was only 95 % sure but MorganeB has reassured me. You are French or francophone, aren't you?
In case OP copies & paste, "avec deux lits <b> séparés."</b> |
That sounds great to me (of course, since I suggested most of it -- but the other translations weren't too different).
You changed the bit to "Please write me if this room is available," which I think makes a lot more sense than what I suggested (which was to have the hotel write you if the room is not available). Actually I never understood "veuillez" very well, but I think that it's the polite form (though, actually, strictly speaking, it's the imperative in French). |
I think MorganB is correct in saying that "exigeons" is quite strong. Perhap better: "Nous avons besoin d'une chambre à deux lits" ("We need a room with two beds").
Issues of "tone" like this are one reason computers are terrible at translations. I ran your original sentence (I would like to book a twin room only) through the Babelfish site recommended by Richard, to see what would happen. I got a word-for-word translation: "Je voudrais réserver une salle jumelle seulement". The problem is that "salle jumelle" (literally "twin room") isn't used in French. It says nothing about the beds. There's a phrase "maisons jumelles", literally "twin houses", which means "semidetached houses". I think "salles jumelles" (twin rooms) would imply two rooms, side by side. It's unclear what they would make of it in the singular, "salle jumelle", "twin room". And that's the trouble with machine translation. (I sign my posts "Larry" because both my wife and I post under the "justretired" name.) - Larry |
Hazarding a guess, a 'salle jumelle' would be one with an interconnecting door to another - and a reception room rather than a bedroom, so you might find yourself paying for the ballroom!!
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Internetexplorer, I think what you ended up with is fine.
- Larry |
While we're discussing French... I was taught at school that you shouldn't put an accent on a capital letter. I have seen them used since but maybe not by native French-speakers. Anyone got a definitive answer ?
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