Talk:La Brabançonne

Le Roi, la Loi, la Liberté !

Aura pour devise immortelle : Le Roi, la Loi, la Liberté ! Aura pour devise immortelle : Le Roi, la Loi, la Liberté ! Le Roi, la Loi, la Liberté ! Le Roi, la Loi, la Liberté !

at the end? the article only mentions Aura pour devise immortelle : Le Roi, la Loi, la Liberté ! (3X)

I take it you are referring to the previously shown English translation of the French words? I have now replaced it with a new translation of my own. -- Picapica 12:05, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The french and english text are incorrect

Would you care to indicate how? -- Picapica 13:20, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

For King, for Freedom, and for Law? = translation from the Dutch lyrics? I think Voor Vorst, voor Vrijheid en voor recht should be translated as " for king, for freedom and for justice " What do you think?

I've given a heading to the above, which was conversation in 2004-2005.

Now: for the French version I translated "Le Roi, la Loi, la Liberté !" as "The King, and Law, and Liberty!" but for the same in translating the trilingual version (reference needed, please!), one user prefers "the" instead of "and" both times - and I've changed it back to "and". Let's assume that the translation need not be literal but should be, as nearly as possible, an English equivalent. Then, while "the Law" sounds ok, "the Liberty" certainly does not. One could say "The King, the Law, and Liberty!" But my take on the meaning is that the praise of law is praise not for the particular legal system but for legality against arbitrary rule - a contrast often made around that time. That is also how the Dutch and German versions read. Hence my preference for "The King, and Law, and Liberty!" --Wikiain (talk) 23:03, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Article name

See Talk:Belgium#The Brabançonne. — SomeHuman 2007-06-05 00:06 (UTC)
The former became archived: Talk:Belgium/Archive_3#The_Brabançonne. As no further reactions came, there has not been any support for a continued violation of the WP article naming convention, which does not allow the name to start with a definite article that is not absolutely necessary. Note that my archived comment mentioned "Das Lied von Brabant" as a name in German, but this appears to be an erroneous 'translation' like one may occasionally encounter "The Song of Brabant" in English. Whatever may have been in mind when the 'Brabançonne' was created as a national anthem, it had not been some old song of e.g. the Duchy of Brabant, its original lyrics did not mention Brabant, and that area went far into the Netherlands from which Belgium was being separated. Perhaps the patriotic author still hoped to conquer that part for Belgium - far from unthinkable during te 1830 revolution. The Dutch and the German language Wikipedias and the now available German text on the official site of Belgium, have "Brabançonne".

I put a footnote in the article, that explains to readers of English how the French, German, and Dutch languages use 'Brabançonne' with a gender that, together, does not allow an implied 'song'. It nevertheless remains unclear which substantive that in French and German is of female grammatical gender and in Dutch of male gender, may fit, or how else these genders became attached to the anthem name 'Brabançonne'. For speakers of either language, the usage of a wrong gender is as immediately recognized as referring to some Jack by 'she' in English. (There are some regional differences in Dutch, but not for the neutre gender, which must be applied to "lied", 'song'). This footnote also exemplifies the definite article not to be a fixed part of the actual name of the anthem.

The definite article is not felt to be an intrinsic part of the name: For instance, Belgians might express not to like some new lyrics to become highly patriotic, by saying one does not want another Brabançonne, ("une autre Brabançonne", "nog een Brabançonne", etc.). Used in a sentence, the definite article in French, Dutch and German is not capitalized, which means it is not considered part of the name. [Dutch people, please do not start about "T/the" Netherlands or "les Pays-Bas", at present I found even those WP article titles as "Netherlands" and fr:Pays-Bas without a definite article, ;-) or :-( as you please - and I had nothing to do with that.]
​▲ SomeHuman 2011-08-28 15:28-21:28 (UTC)

Overlapping

I noticed in the lyric section, that the unoffical translations seem to be overlapping the images. Someone wanna fix it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.164.197.120 (talk) 01:41, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Clean it up.

1., we severly need to clean this up. 2., restore the article before my edit, if you want. 3., if you do, than: GIVE AN ACCURATE TRANSLATION. How I know it isn't accurate, is that the first line should read in English: "Oh Belgium, Oh mother darling." "ô Belgique, ô mère chérie."

VTAbenakiMD (talk) 22:00, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Order

It would appear that the Brabançonne was originally written in French. As such, wouldn't it make sense to give the French version first? john k (talk) 19:27, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

English translations

With apologies to Picapia and predecessor(s), I've revised both of the English translations, which had omissions and inaccuracies as well as sometimes not being "English" - e.g. "the Freedom" (1860 version).

To translate "la Loi" as "Justice" (formerly in the translation of the current French version) is surely wrong. Outside a religious context, "la Loi" means "the Law" (as in "against the law"). Here it appears to signify a written constitution and codified laws, centrally (for Belgium then and now) the Napoleonic code - in contrast with arbitrary rule (l'arbitraire), as was debated in Europe at the time. Thus the German text has "Gesetz" (statute). The idea seems to be that of national and individual liberty under constitutional monarchy. If the committees had wanted to refer to "Justice" ("la Justice"), they surely would have done so.

But the two translations still don't succeed, in my own view. I just can't get them into plausible English. That may be because the French is already implausible - what may have seemed fine to committees a century or so ago doesn't (to my ear) survive echoes of the crowd scenes in Monty Python's Life of Brian.

Yet translation doesn't seem to be the main problem with this article. Its French and German Wikipedia equivalents (I can't read Dutch) show that:

• both text and tune have a very chequered history
• the official versions (those on government websites) depend only on ministerial circulars and are not legally established
• several versions are in use (not counting a bawdy student version) in all three (or four or five) languages
• the line referring to about "invincible unity" is sometimes silenced (music only), since it is rather sensitive in a period when there is hot debate over possible break-up
• to revise the English article by drawing heavily on the French, Dutch and/or German versions would have POV risks.

So, would someone who knows the topic like to undertake a thorough revision? Sources are in the other articles. --Wikiain (talk) 21:05, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Good tries, CalicoCatLover! I've labelled all of the English translations "unofficial" and made the heading levels consistent as "====". In your translation of the German version, I've made a few changes. One is to render "hoch!" as "hail!": here "hoch!" seems to have the sense of "give a cheer for". There are other places in your translations where you might find alternatives or something might occur to me - but, as I've said above, the basic problem is the antiquated spirit of the originals. --Wikiain (talk) 03:33, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Ah Brian (CalicoCatLover), I think you have been a bit unwise. Wondering how you managed to translate from three languages without, evidently, having a very good knowledge of any of them, I investigated. I now find that you have not provided your own translations but have simply fed the texts through Google translator and then adjusted some (but, even so, not all) of the moments when the result made no sense whatever. Although you didn't claim to have provided your own translations, you put them in and so appeared to be their author; I think you should have acknowledged how they came about. However, I'll leave them in and have begun to try to rescue them. I am a professionally qualified translator from French and also have experience in translating from German; I'll only tinker with the Dutch. --Wikiain (talk) 23:03, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

I have now re-translated all three of the French versions of the song and the German version, and tinkered with the Dutch. (I don't know any Walloon, though so far as I can see the Walloon version is substantially different from all of the other versions.) It will be seen that these are literal translations, with no poetic aim. If anybody desires to create poetic versions, I suggest that this be done separately. As to the rest of the article, my suggestions are above. --Wikiain (talk) 23:49, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

CalicoCatLover: Sorry to do this to your work, but I am reverting your recent additions, for the following reasons:

• The original text is French and for WP:en there is no point in permuting translations, of that text or of later French versions, into Dutch or German - at the very least, with no indication of their historical significance, and according to WP:de it isn't much.
• As I have noted before, your English translations have evidently been produced simply by churning the text through Google Translator and then going to a dictionary to alter some, but by no means all, of the nonsensical elements in the result. Wikipedia:Translation states: "Machine translation often produces very low quality results. Wikipedia consensus is that an unedited machine translation, left as a Wikipedia article, is worse than nothing.". However, the advice goes on to say, by way of example: "a German article on the topic of oysters might have Austern findet man . . . (word for word: Oysters finds one . . .), which could be translated as Oysters are found". Your translations have a lot of things like "Oysters finds one" - such as "Aspiring to through his courage in". And, making even less sense: "surprised sprouts" (which might sound most odd in Brussels), "Never will they fire us from our crowd" or:

   The latitude sun casting light on your ways,
   And fearlessly stares you in the future.
   You mint your prince, His love flows from you,
   His hand guides you to the glory job.

• The result is not to provide any useful information. The article already has some decent (I think) translations of the various versions of the French original, and of the current officially recognised French, Dutch and German versions. Translating other translations, even if it were done well, would only clutter the article. Adding bad translations of translations is not helpful.
• By all means do this as a hobby, just for yourself and I wish you fun with it, and think of contributing to WP in other ways. --Wikiain (talk) 23:25, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Recordings of music

User 69.160.120.125: HU12 has reverted your additional recording, without a reason. I'm sure you added it in best faith, but to my ear it is really not as good as the others already there. --Wikiain (talk) 22:54, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Dutch or Flemish

On 6 July user 96.25.192.54 changes some of the references to the "Dutch" version to "Flemish", that being actually the language spoken in northern Belgium. That is of course correct about the language spoken. However, it doesn't follow that this text must be in Flemish and not Dutch. WP:fr, WP:ne and WP:de all refer to it as being in Dutch. So does the cover of the Helmut Lotti trilingual CD <http://www.arquebusiers.be/brabanconne.htm> Wikiain (talk) 01:30, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Flemish to Dutch is the equivalent of English(U.K.) to English. Just like English(U.K.), the term Flemish ("Vlaams") is typically used if one makes a distinction between Dutch(Belgium), and Dutch(Netherlands), (for example, when selecting subtitles, or voice actors) or when refering to a dialect.

But the official language of Belgium is Dutch ("Nederlands").

Trying to specify they speak Dutch(Belgium) in Belgium, is unnecessarily specific. And because it's a different word, it might be confusing for any reader who's unaware Flemish is Dutch(Belgium). Qube0 (talk) 06:35, 13 April 2022 (UTC)

Requested move 7 January 2017

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: page moved. (non-admin closure) — Sam Sailor 06:03, 15 January 2017 (UTC)

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Brabançonne → La Brabançonne – This is the complete title of this work, see the sheet music, the poster in the article and the Wikisource text. The Evil IP address (talk) 18:35, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

• Support. Analogous to La Marseillaise. —Roman Spinner (talk)(contribs) 01:56, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support. Not just analogous: in both cases, including "La" makes a correct French noun, while just "brabançonne" and "marseillaise" are adjectives. Wikiain (talk) 02:08, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support. That's the title. -- Necrothesp (talk) 14:34, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Queen

If Belgium has a queen in charge, do the lyrics change? – Illegitimate Barrister (talk • contribs), 04:58, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

Not an obvious parallel

Both slogans obey the Rule of Three and both contain the word "liberty". But one is a royalist slogan of privileged Belgians and the other a republican slogan of people who hate hierarchy. The parallel is less than obvious. If somebody wants to source a claim that there's a parallel, fine. Otherwise, I'm gonna delete this. — Isaac Rabinovitch (talk) 19:35, 2 July 2021 (UTC)