Paul Dessart was a man with a passion for Hymenoptera and a quirky sense of humor. His area of expertise was Ceraphronoidea, and most of the modern work that has been done on the superfamily can be attributed to him. This makes his work invaluable to anyone working on Ceraphronoidea.
As a man from the French part of Belgium, he had a strong sense of pride for his country. As a result, many of his papers are written in French. Unfortunately, I do not know French.
Since the information contained within these documents is highly relevant to my research, I decided to undertake the task of translating important portions of Dessart’s papers from French into English.
I reached out to my friends and family and asked if anyone knew French. It turned out that my grandfather, Dr. Joseph F. Muratore, is fluent in French, as well as Greek, Latin, Italian and Sicilian (there is a difference!).
My grandfather graduated from Columbia University and attended medical school at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He had a childhood passion for entomology, and he even collected butterflies to build his own collection. When I asked if he would help me translate Dessart’s papers, he was thrilled to accept.
To assist with working on translations, I also experimented with free translation software, namely Google Translate. I quickly ran into trouble using this approach. Problems like substituted letters or unintentional spacing can cause errors in translation software and create unreliable translations. There are also words that do not translate, such as in the example below.
Since these publications contain many entomological or anatomical terms that do not translate, it is not a simple matter of turning it over to a native French speaker or running it through translation software– a certain degree of entomological experience is needed to make sense of the original text and translate it properly. My grandfather’s experience and knowledge of medical and anatomical terms has helped immensely. By working with my grandfather and using Google Translate for help, we have been able to translate large portions of text.
The process is time consuming, but ultimately rewarding—along with the satisfaction of unraveling the text and finally being able to understand it, I find that I am gaining a much better understanding of the characters that Dessart used to distinguish different species.
I am also learning more about Dessart himself. While working on translations, I often find sentences that reveal Dessart’s quirky sense of humor. For example, in his 1997 paper titled “Les Megaspilinae ni europeens, ni americains. 1. Le genre Conostigmus Dahlbom, 1858 (Hym. Ceraphronoidea Megaspilidae)”, he explains the etymology of Conostigmus albovarius as a combination of the latin albo, which means “white”, and varius, which means “varigated”, referring to the odd coloring of the species. He then follows his description with the sentence “Ne pas scinder le mot en alb-ovarius!” which I translated to “don’t separate it as alb-ovarius!”, which would mean “white ovary” or “white egg”.
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