Help with French translations?

[Mourningstar]

A long, long time ago (okay, a year and a half ago) I wrote a fic, and it was vital for the plot twist ( a plot twist in a plotless story, I do so flatter myself ) that I include two lines of French in the end.

I originally had the lines translated by a friend of mine, who had studied the language for three years. Since she wasn't a 100% certain of them, I added a little tidbit in the author's notes, asking, that if anyone spotted a mistake, please let me know.

Unfortunately everyone and their dog rushed to offer their opinion, either to confirm that it was word perfect or that I'd written complete pig's latin.

I still get those messages, and now I'd like to have those lines either confirmed to be correct or corrected once and for all.

“Même sans la douleur, tu tiendrais mon amour…”

You would hold my love even without the pain.

“Mon chéri…”

My beloved.

There are some here, who I know to be completely fluent, and many who can easily put together at least a few sentences, so please, if you feel that you can help me, I'd be most grateful.

[redsliver]

If the subject of the love is male its good, there are other ways to say all this but this way reads well to me. If its a female then there'd be some small changes.

French is my second language and I'm a little out of practice so a second opinion certainly wouldn't hurt.

[Mourningstar]

Thank you, redsliver. It was indeed, what I was going for.

[EveKnight75]

Usually, if the subject is masculine, you'd use mon. If the subject is feminine, use ma. The general exception is: if the noun itself begins with a vowel, use mon as a possessive no matter what the gender.

So in this case:

My beloved (female): Ma chérie

My beloved (male): Mon chéri

My love: Mon amour

The thing is, you can use mon chéri to refer to a female and get away with it. It's kinda like saying "Hey guys!" to a bunch of girls. If you want to refer to a female as "my love", you can also use ma vie to give it a more feminine flavor. If you add an adjective in there, you can change mon to ma, such as ma belle amour.

Now for the other sentence:

“Même sans la douleur, tu tiendrais mon amour…”

You would hold my love even without the pain.

You do realize that you flipped it around when translating, right?

"Même sans la douleur, tu tiendrais mon amour..."

Even without the pain, you would hold my love...

You would hold my love even without the pain.

"Tu tiendrais mon amour même sans la douleur."

In English, "hold my love" and "even without" sound slightly awkward. "Même sans" sounds normal to me. "Tu tiendrais mon amour" is grammatically correct, but it sounds a little odd. If you want the word "hold", try détenir instead. Tenir refers to grasping physical objects, but détenir refers to grasping abstract objects/concepts like love. How about "Tu détiendrais mon amour"?

Then again, French is a second language to me as well. If you can wait until September, I can try to locate this guy from Armenia who likes to scribble romantic poetry in his spare time. If not him, there's guaranteed to be a French poet on campus somewhere.