French word for the English noun "correspondence" ?

Question

I would like to put a sentence on my webpage underneath my contact information that states that it will take time for me to respond to email, text, phone calls or mail. The English text will read:

Your patience is kindly requested in answering correspondence.

In other words, I am letting the sender know that it will take time to respond, therefore I kindly ask for their patience in my replying to all correspondence. I have asked a native French speaker for help in putting this into French and the response was:

Je vous prie de faire preuve de patience en me contactant.

He said this would translate as (not sure if this is correct):

Your patience is asked to answer the correspondance.

My question is - I would like a literal translation of this, so would it not work to say: (?)

Votre patience est prié de répondre à la correspondance.

Is the English word correspondance not translated as la correspondance?

I would greatly appreciate any suggestions to make this a somewhat literal translation while at the same time being grammatically correct. In this case, the English word correspondance is a noun and not a verb as in correspond.

Answer 1

Not sure about English but in French, correspondance while obviously closely related to "correspondence" is mostly reserved for written communication so would rule out phone calls. Your friend rightly used contacter which covers all the methods you cite.

Je vous prie de faire preuve de patience en me contactant.

This means the people contacting you are kindly asked to be patient while doing it. I wouldn't write it that way because it is not while contacting you that they need to be patient but later, when waiting for a reply.

Your patience is asked to answer the correspondence.

This sentence doesn't translate the previous one and seems odd to me. It looks like the requester is also the one who answer.

Votre patience est prié de répondre à la correspondance.

This sentence makes no sense in French. The patience is impersonated and asked to answer itself to the correspondence.

Here is a couple of ways to express what you want to say:

Si vous me contactez, je vous remercie de faire preuve de patience en attendant ma réponse.

or the more formal

Si vous essayez de prendre contact avec moi, je vous serais reconnaissant de bien vouloir faire preuve de patience en attendant ma réponse.