Causative make and faire: A case of mismatch

This chapter compares the causative verb make, as used in verbal periphrastic causative constructions, with its intuitive equivalent in French, faire. Relying on a combination of comparable and parallel corpus data, it investigates the syntactic, semantic and lexical features of the English and French constructions, and examines the equivalents selected by professional translators to express the idea of causation in the other language. The analysis reveals that the apparent equivalence between make and faire is in fact deceptive. Not only do the two verbs show marked differences in their behaviour and preferences, but they are also rarely chosen as equivalents of each other in professional translations. The chapter ends with some implications for translation and foreign language teaching.