Cette traduction surprendra peut-être d’abord le lecteur par certaines curiosités du vocabulaire.
This translation will perhaps at first surprise the reader due to certain oddities of vocabulary
You have to love the understatement with which Georges Belmont and Hortense Chabrier start their translators’ note which prefaces the French translation of A Clockwork Orange (our translation).
The Belmont/Chabrier translation is an astonishing piece of writing, and the fact that it has remained in print since first publication almost fifty years ago bears evidence to that. We have looked closely at what they have achieved, and how their “French-Nadsat” compares with Burgess’s original, in a new peer-reviewed article in Meta journal, volume 65 (3).