I’ve come across a puzzling punctuation problem! I’m working on a
document in US English. It includes a citation of a French text in
the original French, and this citation includes a citation (all in
French).
Guillemets are used in the original French text’s citation. These
are French angle quotes, i.e. « or », which are usually used
in French in places where double quotation marks (») would be
used in US English. Just as double quotation marks (“ ”) are
changed to single (‘ ’) when making a text into a citation in
English, the guillemet («) is turned into a double quotation mark
in French (“). A bit confusing, but hey, they’re different
languages!
I assume that I should change the guillemets (« ») interior to
the citation into single quotation marks (‘ ’) as is typical in
English.
But then should the order of punctuation also be anglicized? This
makes it grammatically incorrect in French, but if you don’t do
this, it looks really weird in an English document, and with English
quotation marks.
Example
In French, the following is the original text to be cited:
il pourrait donc être dit, [. . .] que ce monde, en tant que
monde, n’existe pas. [. . .] En ce sens, dire « l’Afrique existe »,
ce serait dire « le monde n’existe pas ».
Note that commas and periods follow the quotation marks, as is
grammatically correct in French. As I mentioned, when made into a
citation, in French, « and » become “ and ”, just like in
English a double quote (“ ”) becomes a single quote (‘ ’).
For anyone interested, in a French document, the French citation
would look as follows:
« il pourrait donc être dit, [. . .] que ce monde, en tant que
monde, n’existe pas. [. . .] En ce sens, dire “l’Afrique existe”,
ce serait dire “le monde n’existe pas”. »
Now when I cite it in an English document, should it be:
- Nothing changed inside the English quotation marks on either end
of the citation:
il pourrait donc être dit, [. . .] que ce monde, en tant que
monde, n’existe pas. [. . .] En ce sens, dire « l’Afrique existe »,
ce serait dire « le monde n’existe pas ».
- Anglicized French guillemets (
«and»become‘and’):
il pourrait donc être dit, [. . .] que ce monde, en tant que
monde, n’existe pas. [. . .] En ce sens, dire ‘l’Afrique existe’,
ce serait dire ‘le monde n’existe pas’.
- Anglicized French guillemets (
«and»become‘and’)
and single quotation marks moved to be after periods and commas:
il pourrait donc être dit, [. . .] que ce monde, en tant que
monde, n’existe pas. [. . .] En ce sens, dire ‘l’Afrique existe,’
ce serait dire ‘le monde n’existe pas.’
Best Answer
If you are quoting a chunk of French then it is no longer an English document: it is a mixed English and French document. For the French parts you should follow French rules, and for the English parts, English rules.
You should no more change the French punctuation rules to correspond to English punctuation rules than you should change n’existe pas to ne pas exist to correspond to English word order.