Help with translation, please

Hi.

Can someone help me with this translation, please? The sentence in question is: "La distinction entre quoi et la conjonction quoique (qui en est d'ailleurs issue) ne s'est établie que dans le cours du XVIIIe s."I can understand most of the sentence; it's the bit in parentheses that's giving me trouble. I know that être issu de means " to be derived from" so I think the clause means something like " which is derived from elsewhere" but then the en seems superfluous. Any help would be appreciated.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on February 4, 2011 at 9:48pm

Almost! The "en" means "from 'quoi'"-- in other words, what the sentence is saying is that "quoique" is derived from "quoi que".

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Key StudentPermalink Reply by Curt Jugg on February 4, 2011 at 10:01pm

Ah, so in this case d'ailleurs doesn't mean "from elsewhere" but something like "incidentally"?

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EducatorPermalink Reply by stu harris on February 5, 2011 at 12:30am

d'ailleurs is a tricky one. It's normal translation is besides, but quite often I translate it, in context, as by the way.

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EducatorPermalink Reply by stu harris on February 5, 2011 at 12:44am

Upon further thought -- if I was translating for a client who was happy to accept a free translation, I think I'd render the parenthetical phrase as (which of course is derived from it).

To me, the principle of free translation is to arrive at a text which is what an English writer would have written to express the idea in a sentence. It always flows well but isn't necessarily very faithful to the original. Thus it isn't generally acceptable in technical translation. OK, lecture over.