Help needed - English to French translation

Can any of you super bright well travelled people out there help us. We are trying to get an accurate French translation for an English phrase but we are not sure which of our possibilities is the most accurate or indeed if there is a better more accurate translation out there!!!

 

The English phrase that we want to translate is:

 

"Scars remind us where we have been . They don't have to dictate where we are going "

 

Our best attempts at French have given us the two following possibilities:

 

"Les cicatrices nous rappellent d'où nous venons. Mais ne dictent pas où nous allons."

 

OR

 

"Les cicatrices nous rappellent sùr nous avons été mais ne dirigent pas eù nous allons."

 

Any help would be gratefully received.

 

Thanks

 

Alan

Will ask the wife (native French speaker) and revert

 

I do know that idioms very rarely directly translate..,

 

"Les cicatrices nous rappellent d'où nous venons. Mais ne dictent pas où nous allons."

Alan

 

is the better one.

 

If the full stop is removed, the phrase sounds better: "Les cicatrices nous rappellent d'où nous venons mais ne dictent pas où nous allons."

 

an alternative: "Les cicatrices nous rappellent où nous étions. Elles ne forcent pas où nous allons."

Edited August 8, 201312 yr by trex

Wife was somewhat non-committal and shoulder shruggy.

 

Typically french but rather unhelpful!

Wife was somewhat non-committal and shoulder shruggy.

 

Typically french but rather unhelpful!

 

Perhaps French was one of her weaker subjects at school.

Thanks for trying KirstenS we had a similar response from a French friend - perhaps being idiomatic it does not have a direct translation. Thanks for the suggestion Trex, it does flow better as one sentence.

I suspect that the real trouble is the English phrase.

In the first part, scars are real visible wound repairs,

but in the second, they become more like emotional matters.

So, what starts out as a straightforward statement becomes a philosophical matter and there is possibly a subtle change to the meaning of the word scar.