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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   1929 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 12, 2026

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Devil’s advocate: that ship sailed immediately. Even the earliest collected versions did shit like spelling the title “Monte Christo.” Who knows what else was modified?

And that’s for the original French. I’m not sure if Dumas wrote much English, but he never published his own translation.

I’m not sure if Dumas wrote much English, but he never published his own translation.

A while ago I whined about how “écu” is often translated as “crown” in The Three Musketeers.

This is a perfectly legitimate translation. A "shield" is not a unit of currency, it would be distracting to talk about people paying so many "shields" for something.

"Crown" is not only British currency: M-W has it as "any of several old gold coins with a crown as part of the device". Did écus have crowns on them? Why yes they did.

This is a perfectly legitimate translation.

No, it's a confusing localization—or, in Nabokov's words, a paraphrase.

A "shield" is not a unit of currency. It would be distracting to talk about people paying so many "shields" for something.

If "shield" sounds wrong to Anglophone ears, that's their fault for failing to acknowledge the validity of French currency units. And there are zillions of fantasy stories that use outlandish-seeming currency units with which readers quickly become comfortable.

"Crown" is not only British currency: Merriam-Webster has it as "any of several old gold coins with a crown as part of the device".

It doesn't matter. There is no good reason to falsely insert the French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. shields into the ranks of the English/British, Scandinavian, Czech, etc. crowns, and thereby erase a meaningful distinction between two categories.

It isn't a paraphrase any more than wiring "horse" instead of "cheval" is a paraphrase.

If "shield" sounds wrong to Anglophone ears, that's their fault for failing to acknowledge the validity of French currency units. It doesn't matter. There is no good reason to falsely insert the French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. shields into the ranks of the English/British, Scandinavian, Czech, etc. crowns, and thereby erase a meaningful distinction between two categories.

You've invented a distinction that does not exist. "Crown" is not limited to those things. I have already shown you the definition. It's a fact of life that no two words in different languages have exactly the same meaning.

There's no particularly good reason to translate "ecu" at all. If you read a history book about the period, it will say "ecus", and translators of novels should just follow that convention. Should we translate "sestertius"? "Solidus"? "Ducat"? "Reichsmark"?

An autistic fixation on accuracy in translating currency names in literature is basically a high modernist project. The based and lindy approach is to pick a reasonable substitute. Matthew 20:2 KJV: "And when he had agreed with the labourers for a penny [orig. dēnarion] a day, he sent them into his vineyard."

That word choice actually is justifiable, since the penny historically evolved from the denarius. Likewise, it would be reasonable to translate "solidus" as "shilling" and "libra" as "pound". In contrast, the French écu (3 livres) and the English crown (1/4 pound) do not appear to be cognate descendants of the same Carolingian or Roman coin.

Similarly, a crown is simply a gold coin with a crown on it. No problem!

There's a basically inexhaustible fund of such examples of all kinds of currencies.

Mark 12:42: "And there came a certain poor widow, and she threw in two mites [lepta], which make a farthing [quadrans]."

There was no such coin as a "mite" in Britain at all, it merely meant "a coin of low value" due to a low-value coin of such a name in the Netherlands - so that's what they used in the translation.

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