In reply to John2:
> The title was Geoff Sutton's (the translator's) masterstroke. Conquistadors is such a grandiloquent word that you instinctively imagine it will be followed by something equally grandiose, only to be brought up short by 'the useless'. The rhetorical effect is called bathos, and it evinces a self-denigrating humour for which the French are not always renowned.
I like to think I was aware of the bathos in the French title, and of Geoff Sutton's valiant attempt to sustain it in English; I just happen to find the result jarringly awkward and incongruous.
But I suspect book titles may present delicate challenges for translators, because they can be very compressed expressions of a distinct cultural perspective. So the translators have my sympathy. It's interesting that some well-known titles of European climbing books have been tweaked or even changed altogether in their English editions, perhaps to respect perceived Anglo-Saxon sensibilities, or maybe just to try to improve sales. Bonatti's 'On the Heights' mentioned in this thread, or Buhl's 'Nanga Parbat Pilgrimage', are just two examples. And it works the other way, so 'Into the void' becomes 'La mort suspendue'.
But then American publishers have done that with British books too - most notably perhaps when Dutton published Hunt's 'The Ascent of Everest' as 'The Conquest of Everest' ... I wonder what Colonel Hunt made of that.