Any French house selling internationally publishes in two languages, and almost all of them do it the same way: the notice is written in French, then translated. The result is grammatically correct and quietly wrong. English-speaking buyers read a French catalogue in English words, and something in the register tells them the description was made for somebody else.
Two traditions, two grammars
The French catalogue tradition is nominal and compressed. It opens with the object as a noun phrase — "Commode en acajou d'époque Louis-Philippe" — and lets the material, style and period stack up in a single breath, with attribution conventions (attribué à, dans le goût de, d'après) doing precise legal work at the end.
The Anglo-American tradition is more verbal and more sequential. It prefers a title that reads as a description — "A Louis-Philippe mahogany commode" — and a body that unfolds in clauses: the top with rounded front corners, above a frieze drawer, raised on shaped bracket feet. Translate a French notice literally and you get English that is nominally dense and oddly airless. Translate an English notice literally and the French becomes chatty and imprecise, the sort of prose a French specialist reads as amateur.
Vocabulary that has no counterpart
Then there are the words. Bronze d'édition, épreuve, cachet de fondeur, marqueterie Boulle, époque — each carries a technical meaning that the nearest English word only approximates. Good English catalogues solve this by borrowing the French outright and glossing where necessary; bad translations replace it with something vaguer and lose the information.
It runs the other way too. Condition vocabulary in English is granular and litigated — rubbing, foxing, losses, restorations, scattered surface abrasions — and a French condition narrative written in that register sounds pedantic unless it is rebuilt around usure, manques, restaurations, accidents. These are not synonyms across a dictionary; they are two systems for describing the same damage, each with its own conventions about what must be disclosed and how.
What translation costs you in practice
Three costs, all measurable. Time, first: a translation pass is a second queue, usually after the catalogue deadline, usually the thing that slips. Money, second, at roughly the price of a specialist hour per twenty lots. And trust, third, which is the expensive one — a foreign buyer who senses a translated notice discounts it, and discounts the house's care along with it.
There is a fourth cost that is easy to miss: search. Buyers search in their own language with their own terms, and a literal translation frequently produces phrases nobody types. "Meuble d'appui" becomes "support furniture", which no English-speaking collector has ever searched for, and the lot disappears from the results it should be winning.
Writing twice from the same object
The alternative is not two independent catalogues. It is one set of facts — the same object, the same materials, the same date, the same damages — expressed twice, each time in the conventions of its own tradition. The two notices must agree on everything that matters and need not agree on a single sentence structure.
That discipline is easier to state than to staff, which is why so few houses do it. It requires a cataloguer comfortable in both registers, working on the same object, at the same time, with the same photographs in front of them. Catalot writes both versions natively from the same images and the same note for exactly this reason: not French translated into English, but a French notice and an English notice, produced together, each idiomatic in its own catalogue. You correct both; they stay consistent because they came from the same reading of the object.
A short test
Take a notice from your last sale and read only the English aloud to someone who has not seen the French. If they ask what an expression means, or if the sentences arrive in an order an English catalogue would not use, you are publishing a translation. Buyers notice — usually without being able to say why — and in a market where a lot may be bought from three time zones away, sounding local in both languages is not a nicety. It is part of the description.