Seventy Four Gun Ship: Fitting Out the Hull (vol. 2)

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE The Note at the beginning of Volume I has highlighted the principal challenges of a transla­tion of this kind, and I will not therefore repeat myself here. A word on sources for many of the technical words used : the most useful has been Lescallicr's "Vocabulaire des Termcs dc Marine Anglois el Francois" (1783 London edition from the original 1777), and 1 have quoted him in .some of the marginal notes. Next to Lescallier, I have referred widely to Falconer's "Universal Dictionary of the Marine" (1780 edition), and to Steel's "Elements and Practice of Naval Architec­ture" (1805), although this latter work has been less useful in this Volume than in the first. Of considerable assistance in certain sections has been the Encyclopaedia Britannica (4th Edition, 1810). These four sources have provided about sixty percent of the technical vocabulary used; the remainder has been gleaned from many sources, some contemporary, some by modern authors, although these have to be used with considerable caution. Once again 1 must express my gratitude to the staff of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich for their unfailingly helpful advice and assistance; in particular, I should acknowledge my debt to Mr. David White, Curator of the Draughts Room, who has read all of the manuscript of this and the previous Volume, and made many comments and construc­tive criticisms which have helped me to avoid falling into errors of fact or terminology. At the risk of repeating myself, I should say a brief word about the marginal notes : the majority of the notes in this Volume are not straight translations from those in the original; like Jean Boudriot, I have used the margin to elucidate technical terms, to com­ment occasionally on their derivation, and to add comments which assist in the understan­ding of the text; in the same light must be seen a number of comparisons between French and English naval practice, which may be helpful in understanding points which might otherwise cause raised eyebrows to English readers. Occasionally, readers will find a French word in the margin; this is particularly the case with ranks and titles, which are frequently impossible to translate accurately. I have preferred therefore in such cases to indicate the original term in the margin to show that the translation in the text is only approximate. When Volume IV of the original was published it contained a number of corrections to the text of the first three Volumes; all these corrections (and a number of others) have been incorporated in the English edition. Nevertheless, despite the assistance given to me, and lengthy discussions with Jean Boudriot on some of the obscurer passages, some errors will inevitably have crept in, for which 1 take full responsibility; it is my firm belief that a translator should translate rather than interpret, and never place himself between the author and his readers; I hope I may be forgiven for the few occasions where, with the author's agreement, I have strayed somewhat from this strict path. David H. Roberts 1986

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