Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/275

Rh a line of Stendhal. And not liking the plainness of the style and quite missing the terse, crisp forcefulness of it, he proceeded to embellish it in the English translation, smoothing and amplifying and incidentally falling into numerous amusing blunders. The simple statement, for instance, that a carriage was heard "approaching at a trot," was expanded by the translator into "the brisk trot of the two sturdy little horses," regardless of the fact that the context showed that the carriage in question was a one-horse vehicle.

And, fourthly, it is essential to keep in mind the limitations of the special public for whom you are translating. A version of a classic author intended as a "crib" for college students is necessarily a very different sort of production from a rendering intended for the general reader. In the former case, the intention is to emphasize the points of difference between