A character says What the hell are you doing here? and you translate it as Que faites-vous ici ?
The denotative meaning survives intact. The furious, informal speaker has become a polite stranger. Nothing in your translation is wrong, and the character has been replaced.
Register and connotation carry as much information as the words they attach to: not what is said, but how, by whom, and to whom.
What register is
Register is the level of formality of an expression. The usual four-step scale applies to both languages, with French terminology that is worth knowing because it is more codified:
- formal — soutenu: literary, elevated, sometimes archaic
- standard — courant: neutral, the default of written prose
- informal — familier: spoken, relaxed, between equals
- vulgar — vulgaire or argotique: crude, offensive, or marked as underworld slang
Each level tells the reader something about the social situation, the relationship between the speakers, the emotional temperature and the speaker's background. A translation that levels all four to courant deletes all of it.
The structural asymmetry you need to know
The two languages do not build formality the same way, and this is the single most useful thing to understand before translating dialogue.
English builds register mainly through vocabulary. Its double stock of words — Germanic on one side, Latin and French on the other — gives almost every idea two levels: begin and commence, ask and enquire, buy and purchase, get and obtain, end and terminate. The Germanic word is warm and ordinary; the Latinate word is formal and distant. Nothing in the grammar changes.
French builds register through grammar as well. Formality shows in the inversion of subject and verb (Que faites-vous ? against Vous faites quoi ?), in the retention of the negative ne, in tenses reserved for writing (the passé simple, the imperfect subjunctive), and above all in the choice between tu and vous.
The practical consequence: a translator moving into French has grammatical levers English never offered, and a translator moving into English must reconstruct with vocabulary what French was doing with syntax.
Register in practice
The same idea at different levels
- a child (standard) / a kid (informal) ↔ un enfant (standard) / un gamin (informal, faintly pejorative), un gosse (informal)
- a police officer (standard) / a cop (informal) ↔ un policier (standard) / un flic (informal, more marked than cop)
- I don't know ↔ Je ne sais pas (written) / Je sais pas (spoken) / J'sais pas, Chais pas (informal, phonetically written)
The cop and flic pair illustrates the central difficulty: dictionary equivalence is not register equivalence. Cop is unremarkable in most American contexts; flic carries more edge in French. Two words can be perfect translations of each other and still sit at different heights.
The intensity scale
Take one question at four levels:
- Formal. What on earth are you doing here? ↔ Que diable faites-vous ici ? — astonishment expressed without coarseness, slightly dated on both sides.
- Standard. What the heck are you doing here? ↔ Mais qu'est-ce que vous fichez ici ? — heck is a euphemism for hell, ficher a euphemism for foutre. The two languages soften by the same mechanism.
- Informal. What the hell are you doing here? ↔ Qu'est-ce que tu fous ici ? — annoyance is now explicit, and note that French also switches to tu.
- Vulgar. What the fuck are you doing here? ↔ Qu'est-ce que tu fous ici, bordel ? — English infixes the obscenity inside the phrase; French appends it at the end.
That last structural difference matters. English swears inside the sentence (what the hell, abso-bloody-lutely); French swears at the edges (putain, bordel, merde, before or after). A French translation that tries to reproduce the English position produces something no French speaker says.
Calibrating obscenity
Never calibrate swearing by dictionary equivalence. Calibrate by frequency and shock value.
Putain is extremely frequent in spoken French and often carries little more force than an interjection; fuck is considerably stronger in most English contexts. Translating every fuck as putain tends to under-translate, and translating every putain as fuck makes a French character sound aggressive in English. Likewise merde is milder than it looks and shit is milder than merde in some registers.
The useful question is not what does this word mean but who says this, how often, and what does a listener feel when they hear it.
Connotation, beyond register
Connotation is the emotional colouring a word carries beyond its definition: neutral, ameliorative or pejorative.
- old people (direct, sometimes blunt) / the elderly (formal, institutional) ↔ les vieux (pejorative) / les personnes âgées (neutral, standard)
- thrifty (positive) / stingy (negative) ↔ économe / radin — same behaviour, opposite judgement
- ambitious ↔ ambitieux, which in French can shade towards the ruthless far more easily than in English
Connotation is where translation quietly takes sides. Rendering old people as les vieux adds a contempt the source did not have — unless the speaker is contemptuous, in which case it is exactly right. The word is chosen by the character, not by the dictionary.
Four pitfalls
- Over-translating. Pushing a mildly marked word into strong slang, so a merely casual character becomes coarse.
- Under-translating. The far more common failure: neutralising everything into standard register because standard is safe. What the fuck rendered as Que fais-tu ici ? loses the whole emotional charge.
- Confusing informal with vulgar. Gamin, flic, ficher are informal; bordel, putain, foutre are vulgar. They are not interchangeable, and mixing the two levels gives a character an incoherent voice.
- Ignoring how connotations age. Slang dates faster than any other layer of language. A translation of a 1980s novel into the slang of today will read as a period piece within a decade — and current teenage slang has often already turned over by the time the book is printed. Prefer durable informality to the very latest word.
A fifth, less often mentioned: geography. Register is not uniform across the French-speaking world; an expression that is neutral in Montréal may be marked in Paris, and vice versa. Decide which variety you are writing in, and stay in it.
How to choose
- Identify the speaker. Age, background, education, and how they speak elsewhere in the text.
- Identify the relationship. In French this is not optional: every line forces a choice between tu and vous that English never had to make.
- Identify the temperature. Register drops as emotion rises, in both languages.
- Stay consistent. A character who speaks carefully does not suddenly swear — unless the author made that the point, in which case the break must survive translation.
- Compensate when you must. If a register cannot be reproduced on the word where it sits, rebuild it nearby — the technique covered in article 12.
Conclusion
Register and connotation are not secondary detail. They are what tells the reader who is speaking, to whom, and in what state.
Translating what the hell and what on earth the same way collapses two different people into one.
So the question is never only what does this mean. It is: how is it said, by whom, to whom, and with how much heat.
Because in translation, what is only half the message. The other half is how.