Page talk:Journal officiel de l’État français, Lois et décrets, 14 juin 1941.djvu/3

Article 5 – translation of lines 4 and 5

"Business loan broker" is in article 5 twice, in lines 4 and 5. Lines 4 and 5 of Article 5 in the original are:

• Agent immobilier ou de prêts de capitaux,
• Négociant de fonds de commerce, marchand de bien,

There's no particular problem with #4, but there is with #5 which uses some terms unique to France that are difficult to translate, and may have had a different meaning during the war. I would translate these two lines as:

• real estate agent (AmEng; or: 'estate agent', BE) or business loan broker,
• commercial finance broker, property trader

The term Négociant de fonds de commerce in particular is unique to France. It's clear that the first two words represent "trader of...", so no problem there; the tough part is: what is "fonds de commerce"? Misleadingly, "fonds" here has nothing to do with "funds", it's more like the intangible assets of a business, including premise location, good will, customer base, but also some tangible assets, and depending on context, can be translated in various ways. A quick look at this, this, or this should make it clear that it is entirely futile to try and come up with a short expression in English that captures anything close to the sense of it in French. I chose "commercial finance broker" partly because it's vaguely in the same domain, and because it is obscure enough in English (70,000 hits) that most people will gloss over it while reading, satisfied that it must mean *something*, and they're not going to look it up right now. That is about the best we can hope for, in English, imho. An alternative would be to leave it in French, which has some support in English sources, precisely because it is such a foreign concept and no English expression will do.

As far as "marchand de bien", the existing "real estate trader" is fine, or perhaps the more English-variant neutral "property trader". This, of course, looks very close to the Agent immobilier ("real estate agent"/"estate agent") in line 4, but the crucial difference is, that the Agent immobilier is only a middleman, and typically earns a fixed or percentage fee as a commission while buyer and seller disburse and collect the sale price and transfer title; whereas the marchand de bien buys and sells properties, paying the price to the seller and taking possession of the title on purchase, and later transferring it to someone else upon sale. I'm not sure how we would make that distinction in English. Adding @Elinruby, @Shakescene, @Scope creep: Mathglot (talk) 05:03, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

@Mathglot: That is old one I did, done by page number and proofread by myself. I think those pages need deleted. The final copy I approved in contained in the translation namespace Translation:Second law on the status of Jews. I check it against the archive docs.Scope creep (talk) 14:36, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

@Mathglot: It appears to be wrong. Scope creep (talk) 14:42, 5 April 2023 (UTC)