Traduction anglaise du Petit Prince

hela a écrit : 1)Once, when I was six years old I saw a wonderful / magnificent picture in a book about the virgin forest called “True Stories”. It depicted a boa swallowing a wild animal. Here is a copy of the drawing.

[a) Is it better to put “once” at the beginning of the sentence not to separate the verb “saw” from its object “a wonderful picture”? - I would usually advise against it, but because the narrator seems to be a child, it's perfectly fine.
b) Should "virgin forest" be capitalized or not? - No. Also note that "virgin forest" is not used as much as "old-growth forest" (more technical) or "primeval forest" (more common).
c) is "depicted" repetitive? => "a picture…depicted"] - Not at all, it's fine.

2)It said in the book / In the book it said [which order?]: “Boas / Boa constrictors (I would use "Boas", as "boas constrictors" are but one species of the genus Boa) swallow their preys / preyin one go / at one stroke whole ("at one stroke" is not correct as it implies speed, and it takes hours to a boa to swallow a prey. "In one go" is fine, but to "swallow whole" is a very common expression in English), without chewing them / it.
[should “prey” be in the plural in English ? => many boas so many preys?] - It should be "preys", but that has less to do with the number of boas and more to do with all the different animals that they prey on. If they only preyed on one species, the singular would be justified.

3)Then, They are then unable to move and have to (If you do not use a verb here, it looks as though you meant to say "they are unable to move or sleep" and made a mistake) sleep for the six months, the time it takes (them) to digest.” - Minor adjustments for flow

4)Thereafter(too fancy a word for a child narrator), I then thought deeply about / reflected deeply onthe adventures of the jungle(This phrasing is a bit confusing to me as it seems that the jungle is the one having adventures… Although the French text is exactly the same and lacks any additional information that would allow us to be more precise, so this could be due - again - to the narrator's age.), and I too managed, with a coloured pencil, to make my first drawing / to draw my first picture. My Drawing Number One (no digits in a literary text + upper-case added per English typography rules). It looked like this:

5)I showed my masterpiece to adults / the grown-ups (better choice for "grandes personnes" + article required as the narrator seems to be talking about all the grown-ups he could find around him) and I asked them if my drawing frightened them.
“Why should a hat be frightening? / Why should one be frightened by a hat?” they replied.
[which construction should be used in English and why, please?] Either will do. I have a slight preference for the latter. If you decide to go with the former, change "should" to "would" ("Why would a hat be frightening?")

6)My drawing did not picture (a drawing cannot "picture" anything - "to picture" is an active process, that can only be achieved by sentient beings) a hat. It pictured a boa (which was) digesting an elephant. - "I had not drawn a hat. I had drawn a boa digesting an elephant." or "It was not a picture of a hat, but one of a boa digesting an elephant."

7) So I drew, therefore,(like "thereafter", a bit too fancy in this case)the boa from (the ?) insidethe inside of the boa(Be very careful with this - your sentence means that he went inside the boa and drew a picture while he was there.) so that grown-ups / adults could understand. They always need some (further ?) explanations (Suggestion: "They always need to have things spelled out for them." - a typical English phrase). My Drawing Number Two looked like this:

8)The grown-ups advised me to forget about / put aside (Either "forget about" or "put/lay aside" will do here) the/my (?) drawings of boas, whether from the inside or the outside, and to get interested instead in geography, history, arithmetic and grammar instead.

9)This is how, at the age of six, I put an end to (implies that he had a career and chose to end it, when in fact, he gave up on the idea of ever having a career) a magnificent / wonderful career as a painter.
[Is it better to put “at the age of six” at the beginning of the sentence not to separate the verb phrase “put an end” from its complement “a wonderful career”?] - It's perfect here.

hela a écrit :1) Is it better to put “once” at the beginning of the sentence not to separate the verb “saw” from its object “a wonderful picture”? - I would usually advise against it, but because the narrator seems to be a child, it's perfectly fine.

Would you please tell me why you do not advise to use "once" at the beginning of a sentence? Is it a question of style ? It is only a matter of flow, to avoid using too many commas. It is correct however, which is why I only "advise" against it.
Would you normally prefer "When I was six years old, I once saw / I saw once a wonderful picture"? - But in this particular sentence I would usually translate to "one day" rather than "once", therefore: "One day, at the age of six, I saw…"

4) a) I then thought deeply about the adventures of the jungle(This phrasing is a bit confusing to me as it seems that the jungle is the one having adventures…)

In other circumstances how would you translate "les aventures de la jungle" then? It is not so much a question of circumstances as a question of having enough information. Is the narrator talking about general adventures that one can have when in a jungle? Is he referring to adventures he dreamt he had in the jungle? In a general way, I would translate this as "adventures in the jungle" anyway, to avoid the confusion I mentioned in my previous post. I would also omit the first "the" as it is a definite article and therefore is supposed to precede a noun that the readers will have no trouble identifying. However, based on this excerpt, I have no idea what specific adventures he is referring to. I would probably translate the whole phrase to "I thought deeply about my adventures in the jungle", or "I thought deeply about the adventures one can have in a jungle, or even "I thought deeply about the kind of adventures that unfold in a jungle". Like I said however, because we are dealing with a child narrator, it's totally fine to translate it as you did.

b) My Drawing Number One (no digits in a literary text + upper-case added per English typography rules). It looked like this:

Would you please tell me why we need upper-case? Are they used in both British and American English?OK. We need to capitalize those letters because the narrator is showing off here. He is basically telling us what he called his "masterpiece". It is the title of this drawing. In English, both UK and US, we generally capitalize the first letter of every word in a title, with the exception of short prepositions or conjuctions. First example that comes to mind: Star Wars Episode VI - Return of the Jedi - you can see that every important word is capitalized, however the very short and common words "of" and "the" are not.

7) So I drew the inside of the boa so that grown-ups could understand.
Here it seems that we don't need a definite article before "grown-ups" like in (5) and (8), why?It is OK to omit the article "the" here, because the phrase could either mean "… pour que les grandes personnes puissent comprendre." or "… pour que des grandes personnes puissent comprendre." - the narrator is telling us that he made his drawing "grown-ups-friendly", which means that he simplified it so that any grown-up could understand it, but he is not necessarily referring to the specific group of grown-ups that he has shown his drawing to. In other words, he is saying that the simplified version would now be understood by "the grown-ups" he had shown the first drawing to AND any other grown-up that would see it in the future.