Translating centuries- urgent

[EmilyA]

Urgent help please! I have to do a translation for a "pupitre" of information, before it gets cobbled together by the tourist office and Google. Can someone remind me if eighteenth century in France should be the same or (as I have vaguely in my head) should be translated as nineteenth century in English?

Thanks

!

[Araucaria]

It's the same as in the UK. So dates between 1800 and 1899 are in the dix-neuvième siècle.

That's because the years 1 to 99 AD were the first century.

As far as I remember, the only confusing bit is that it is common in Italy to do it differently: effectively down there they use a word we might translate as (eg) "the fourteen hundreds" to mean the fifteenth century. And of course you can do that in English too.

[woolybanana]

Does this mean that the French are a century behind? One has wondered.

[Araucaria]

[quote user="woolybanana"]Does this mean that the French are a century behind? One has wondered.[/quote]

And everyone in the world except the Italians, then.

[Judith]

Yes, I remember this quirk with the Italian nomenclature of centuries when I was cataloging books for an art gallery - fortunately one of the curators helped me out, as along with funny dating systems, I knew very little Italian ... almost every other language I had to work in I could cope with but Italians and their centuries - no way!

[Loiseau]

Emily, I just remembered while working on a translation recently that the French usually abbreviate a century in Roman figures (XVIIIe siècle), where we would use Arabic figures (18th century). Probably not very relevant as you are translating towards English, but I thought I would throw it into the mix.

Angela

[EmilyA]

Yes thanks I have done that.

Thanks to all, obviously remembered it wrongly from school. Should I blame the teacher, it was only fifty years ago?

[Araucaria]

[quote user="EmilyA"]Yes thanks I have done that.

Thanks to all, obviously remembered it wrongly from school. Should I blame the teacher, it was only fifty years ago?[/quote]

Yes, you should. I really blame my French teacher for not making a better job of teaching me French: after all, it was only just a little more than 50 years ago.

[Chancer]

Yeah but not this century, even this millenium!!!

I still find it hard to forgive the paedophile that was my French teacher for his tormenting and putting me off the subject completely. I got an unclassified at O level back in the days when we were permitted to be failures!