Translating

Here is my translation of the first few verses of the Old Testament from English to French. 

(1) In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. (2) Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. (3) And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. (4) God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. (5) God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning-the first day.

Au début, Dieu créa les cieux et la terre. Maintenant la terre fut informe et vide, l’obscurité était au-dessus de l'abîme, et l’Espirit suspendait au-dessus des eaux. Et Dieu dit, « Que la lumière soit ! » Et la lumière fut. Et Dieu vit la lumière, qu’était bonne, et Dieu sépara la lumière des obscurités. Et Dieu appela la lumière Jour, et l’obscurité, il appela Nuit. Il y eut soir, et il y eut nuit- le premier jour. 

The biggest difficulty that I had with this translation was remembering the formal written past tense that French uses. The past tense used in everyday speech differs completely from the written past tense in older or more formal writing. After that the hardest thing was translating specific phrases. I especially had trouble with "darkness was over the surface of the deep". I could translate all of those words literally, which I did above, but I don't think that it conveyed the same sense. I looked up the exact phrase that the French bible uses and it was nowhere close to what I had translated. "il y avait des ténèbres sur la face de l'abîme". This difficulty is definitely a result of not being completely fluent in French. The word that the French bible uses for darkness, instead of l'obscurité, is les ténèbres which can  also have the connotation of confusion. I was also confused about how to translate the simple phrase over because it has one main meaning in English but French distinguishes these nuanced differences with completely different phrases. Overall translating just a few phrases was more difficult than I had anticipated.