One snare that translators are constantly falling into is the use of English words which are like the foreign ones, but nevertheless are not equivalent terms, and translations that have taken their place in literature often suffer from this cause; thus Cicero’s Offices should have been translated Duties, and Marmontel never intended to write what we understand by Moral Tales, but rather tales of manners or of fashionable life.  The translators of Calmet’s Dictionary of the Bible render the French ancien, ancient, and write of ``Mr. Huet, the ancient Bishop of Avranch.’’ Theodore Parker, in translating a work by De Wette, makes the blunder of conp 52verting the German word Wlsch, a foreigner (in the book an equivalent for Italian), into Welsh.

Some men translate works in order to learn a language during the process, and they necessarily make blunders.  It must have been one of these ignoramuses who translated tellurische magnetismus (terrestrial magnetism) as the magnetical qualities of Tellurium, and by his blunder caused an eminent chemist to test tellurium in order to find these magnetical qualities.  There was more excuse for the French translator of one of Sir Walter Scott’s novels who rendered a welsh rabbit (or rarebit, as it is sometimes spelt) into un lapin du pays de Galles.  Walpole states that the Duchess of Bolton used to divert George I. by affecting to make blunders, and once when she had been to see Cibber’s play of Love’s Last Shift she called it La dernire chemise de l’amour.  A like translation of Congreve’s Mourning Bride is given in good faith in the first edition of Peignot’s Manuel du Bibliophile, 1800, where it is described as L’E’pouse de Matin_; and the translation which Walpole p 53attributes to the Duchess of Bolton the French say was made by a Frenchman named La Place.

The title of the old farce Hit or Miss was turned into Frapp ou Mademoiselle, and the Independent Whig into La Perruque Indpendante.

In a late number of the Literary World the editor, after alluding to the French translator of Sir Walter Scott who turned ``a sticket minister’’ into ``le ministre assassine’,’’ gives from the Bibliothque Universelle the extraordinary translation of the title of Mr. Barrie’s comedy, Walker, London, as Londres qui se promne.

Old translators have played such tricks with proper names as to make them often unintelligible; thus we find La Rochefoucauld figuring as Ruchfucove; and in an old treatise on the mystery of Freemasonry by John Leland, Pythagoras is described as Peter Gower the Grecian.  This of course is an Anglicisation of the French Pythagore (pronounced like Peter Gore).  Our versions of Eastern names are so different from the originals that when the p 54two are placed