Bhūgarbha: No, it's another one. In 1800 it was translated.
Prabhupāda: And they simply translation, or elaborately like we are doing?
Yogeśvara: Just translation. Sanskrit on the left-hand page, French on the right-hand page, but no commentaries.
Prabhupāda: That is difficult to understand.
Yogeśvara: It was the full twelve cantos, but a very limited edition, and only available in library archives. No one has..., very few people have seen it.
Bhūgarbha: He feels that the French public is very demanding in questions of editing and writing, and he feels that the French that's used in our translations should not, he said, smell of English. Sometimes French translations seem like English written in French. He said those should be in perfect French, and that in the French language there's a need to make things more compact and condensed. He's wondering if we can condense them more than in English.
Prabhupāda: So one of us who knows French nicely, he can do that. But there is no difference. They are taking the ideas from English and translating.
Yogeśvara: He says, Professor Chenique wishes to know, would it not be more valuable if our men spoke Sanskrit and could translate directly from the Sanskrit into French?
Prabhupāda: There is no much difference. Sanskrit is there and the Sanskrit translation is there. Where is the difference? We are giving the Sanskrit and then word-to-word translation.
Bhūgarbha: He says that when one translates from Sanskrit into English and from English into French, that it's not exactly the same thing in French that it was in Sanskrit, he feels...
Prabhupāda: No, if from Sanskrit to French can be translated, I have no objection. But we have no such arrangement.
Yogeśvara: We have no Sanskrit scholars in French yet, no.
Prabhupāda: Not only scholar, not only scholar, he must be a realized soul. Simply scholars will not help, simply scholarship will not help. There are many Sanskrit scholars in India. There are many Sanskrit scholars, original Sanskrit scholars in India, they cannot understand Bhāgavata.
Yogeśvara: Professor Chenique's point is that we are seeking to introduce these books on a university level, and there's a certain standard that must be met.