The author mentions this twice in the novel. In the first, the Prime Minister told his personal assistant, “there is a woman in every case.” After an extensive search to find out if Napoleon actually said it, I reached no evidence. I was either left to translate the quotation literally or find a French equivalent. This specific example became the greatest challenge in my translation, whereby I kept searching until determining a list of several choices. French phrases are both familiar to English readers and tend to make English texts look elegant, so I elected to use “cherchez la femme” instead of the literal meaning that would have been translated from Arabic to English directly. Surprisingly, the phrase came from the 1854 novel, The Mohicans of Paris, by Alexander Dumas. In the interests of ethics, I had to disregard its attribution to Napoleon Bonaparte, merely keeping it anonymous. I believe this is the best choice given the available information. It could simply have been a mistake on the part of the author, after
The author mentions this twice in the novel. In the first, the Prime Minister told his personal assistant, “there is a woman in every case.” After an extensive search to find out if Napoleon actually said it, I reached no evidence. I was either left to translate the quotation literally or find a French equivalent. This specific example became the greatest challenge in my translation, whereby I kept searching until determining a list of several choices. French phrases are both familiar to English readers and tend to make English texts look elegant, so I elected to use “cherchez la femme” instead of the literal meaning that would have been translated from Arabic to English directly. Surprisingly, the phrase came from the 1854 novel, The Mohicans of Paris, by Alexander Dumas. In the interests of ethics, I had to disregard its attribution to Napoleon Bonaparte, merely keeping it anonymous. I believe this is the best choice given the available information. It could simply have been a mistake on the part of the author, after