Mistranslation of a very simple Old French sentence

[yong321]

Legend has it that "Aristotle advised his pupil Alexander to avoid the king's seductive mistress, Phyllis, but was himself captivated by her. She agreed to ride him, on condition that she could play the role of dominatrix." (summarized by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_and_Aristotle) On the Wikipedia page, the Old French verse that told this story ended with Aristotle excusing himself to Alexander, saying

Amour vainc tot, & tot vaincra
tant com li monde durera

with Modern English translation as "Love conquers all, and all shall conquer / As long as the world shall last".

English readers don't need to be fluent in French, much less Old French, to identify the French words corresponding to the English words; e.g. amour "love", vainc "conquers" (think of vanquish), tot "all" (think of total), etc. But what's troubling to me is that the second part of the first line, tot vaincra, is translated as "all shall conquer". Conquer what, or who? The English word conquer is a transitive verb, i.e. it must be followed by an object. It took me a while to realize that "all shall conquer" actually means "(love) shall conquer all". The original author of the verse didn't write "& vaincra tot" simply because the inversion that places vaincra at the end makes it rhyme with the last word of the second line, durera ("last"). But an average English reader having no knowledge of French will have difficulty understanding "all shall conquer". So I edited the Wikipedia page to read "and shall conquer all". A few months later, someone disagreed and changed the translation back, saying this is poetic English.

I took this issue to a language forum and asked for people's opinions. Most forum members agree with me. One even says he initially thought "all shall conquer" meant "all will fight back", which is a totally wrong interpretation. But one member, apparently a native Frenchman, disagreed with me and said the reader should adapt to the text of the author and the translator should respect the style of the author. Others disagreed with him, and my response was that "the adaptation should not go so far as to rendering the 'translated' text incomprehensible in the target language". I have no doubt that his mother tongue influences his assessment of English speakers' low tolerance of flexible word order. If he were to translate the Old French verse into Chinese (suppose he knows some Chinese), the Chinese verse would probably read "爱征服一切，一切征服", the latter part of which likewise makes no sense to a native Chinese speaker.

In Romance languages such as French or Spanish, the primary word order is SVO (Subject-Verb-Object), just like English or Chinese. However, occasionally we see sentences whose constituent is moved to a different position than the SVO rule would stipulate. (E.g. "Ont été reçus Pierre, Paul et Marie", possibly in response to "à Qui a été reçu ?" [from https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordre_des_mots]) Native speakers are used to these sentence structures and can understand the meaning based on context and/or the idiomatic nature of such expressions. As far as I know, there is no metric or index in linguistics to measure the word order flexibility of a language. We know that highly inflected languages such as Latin and Russian have fairly flexible word order. But English and Chinese would be quite low on this metric, while various Romance languages are probably in the middle. Old French will probably be closer to Latin because the case system of nouns from Latin had not been entirely eliminated. While Old French tot is not a noun, the very existence of a case system must have accustomed the speakers back then to mentally evaluate various word orders until the best sense was made. But modern day English speakers don't do that, ending up with a wrong understanding or lack of understanding of the word-by-word literal translation, "all shall conquer".