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In English, you can happily pile on adjectives before a noun (e.g. the big fat ugly green alien), in French, not so much. On top of that, in French some adjectives go before and others afterwards (I humbly admit to never having taken the time to work out why, mostly intuited).

This is something where literal translation just won't cut it, and periphrase work-arounds can just clutter up your text.

What rules of thumb do professional translators use in these cases? Just jettison some adjectives?

(ported from EN-FR proposal)

Gilles 'SO nous est hostile'
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Benjol
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    Do you mean "paraphrase"? Although "periphrase" ties in nicely with your "work-arounds". – hairboat Aug 31 '11 at 13:39
  • Je crois il a écrit périphrase qui manque une accente http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A9riphrase – Richard Harrison Aug 31 '11 at 13:46
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    I'm confident you can pile quite a lot of adjectives too, but with certain typographic rules, such as the use of commas and et. Une magnifique grande maison rouge, spacieuse et bien ensoleillée. If you care to throw English examples at us, I'm sure we'll make a decent job of translating them to French no matter how long. – Joubarc Aug 31 '11 at 13:47
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    As for position of adjectives: http://french.stackexchange.com/questions/319/quand-peut-on-mettre-un-adjectif-avant-ou-apres-un-nom – Stéphane Gimenez Aug 31 '11 at 13:48
  • circumlocution, not periphrase, apparently. – Joubarc Aug 31 '11 at 13:49
  • @Stéphane: thanks, I thought there was one but couldn't find it... and, ermm, it's one I asked myself. (I was looking at the tags adjectifs instead of adjectif) – Joubarc Aug 31 '11 at 13:49
  • @Stéphane, I'm going to have to get into the habit of actually searching here for answers :) – Benjol Aug 31 '11 at 13:53
  • @Joubarc: use [tag:adjectifs] for tags, looks like [tag:adjectifs] in comments, they are hyperlikinfied. – Stéphane Gimenez Aug 31 '11 at 14:00
  • BTW, Usually, the order of the adjectives when there are several is reversed when compared to English. (Obviously complicated by the before/after choice). – Un francophone Aug 31 '11 at 14:01
  • @Stéphane thanks for the tip (took me a moment to understand that you were not telling me how to look for the question...) – Joubarc Aug 31 '11 at 14:01
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    @Benjol one more thing... in whatever order you put the adjectives, don't forget the noun. – Joubarc Aug 31 '11 at 14:04
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    @Stephane, having looked at the answers to that question, I'm thinking that intuition was easier and possibly more reliable :) – Benjol Aug 31 '11 at 14:10
  • English has orders for adjectives too, but most people don't realize it. "The fast green car" is slightly different than "The green fast car". – Andrew Lewis Aug 31 '11 at 15:37
  • @Benjol a comment regarding the issue ofaccepting answers: I couldn't help but notice that you didn't accept answers for most of your questions. I wonder if you could do so, or indicate why you're not satisfied with the answers by editing the questions (and thus bumping them to the front page). – F'x Sep 01 '11 at 13:56
  • @Fx, several reasons. 1) I sometimes don't think to. 2) Often (so far) the pearls don't come first, so I wait. 3) I don't always feel qualified to judge, so I also tend to wait to see what the community thinks. 4) After all that, I tend to forget :) So thanks for the reminder... – Benjol Sep 01 '11 at 19:07

2 Answers2

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You can also pile adjectives in french, before and after the noun.

I don't think there's any formal rule. This is mostly a question of style and usage (the section "Épithète liée" of this article explains this an interesting way). In certain specific cases, the position of the adjective changes the meaning (the article above includes a few words about that as well) but this is also a question of usage.

So we would say:

Le gros alien vert

Le gros alien vert et moche

Le gros, grand et affreux alien vert et malpoli

L'alien vert, grand, affreux, et malpoli

But we wouldn't say (but in poetry, maybe):

Le gros, grand, affreux, malpoli et vert alien

Le bleu alien moche

Even if all of the sentences above are actually not incorrect.
And, specific case:

Un alien sale (an alien that is dirty)

doesn't mean:

Un sale alien (a bloody alien, not to use an f-word)

Anyhow,

Le gros vert Alien
cloche
courait dans la plaine
moche.
La lune était pleine,
proche ;
pour lui quelle aubaine :
roches !
(Mais il se cassa tout de même la figure).

Community
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Shlublu
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3

I think a reasonable paraphrase would be "[noun] who/which was [adjective,adjective,...]"

For example:

L'alien qui était grand, gros, moche, et vert...

Or even more compactly:

Le grand alien gros moche vert...

Either way, I'd put all or all but one of the adjectives after the noun (maybe you want to put one adjective which is the primary one - here, "big" - before the noun, but you could put them all after it).

However, it looks like native French speakers are also fine with doing things in a more "English" way and putting most of the adjectives before the noun (although leaving one after the noun which you'd never do in English), eg.:

Le grand, gros et moche extraterrestre vert...

Jez
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