ural aptitude. Here, on the one hand, is the book to be translated; and here, on the other, is a stout, able-bodied dictionary which can be relied on to give some sort of an equivalent for each of the foreign words. A little patient plodding and industrious thumbing of the pages,—and there you are!
Such is the genesis of a good deal of the mediocre translation which in recent years has brought the whole craft into disrepute. The prevailing modern attitude, in this country at least, is well illustrated by a sentence in a popular novel of the present season. The author, wishing to impress upon us his heroine's want of culture and of literary standards, remarks that she will read anything, ranging all the way from works of real worth to ten-cent translations of French novels. It apparently did not occur to that author that a ten-cent translation of a French novel is
