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I think it's

N'aie pas peur du futur, car je serai toujours là.

But du futur can be de l'avenir. I don't know.

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Thanks for supplying a suggestion. It's a pretty good start, but you have options for several words.

I would indeed use avenir instead of futur here. Although futur is possible, to me it sounds a little stiff considering the association with grammar terms — whereas this is a more heartfelt sentence.

N'aie pas peur de l'avenir, car je serai toujours là.

Also, while toujours can mean always, it can also mean still in that sentence and with that placement, so you could go for a stronger pour toujours.

N'aie pas peur de l'avenir, car je serai là pour toujours.

Or, perhaps too poetically, à jamais :

N'aie pas peur de l'avenir, car je serai là à jamais.

Also, if your original sentence does indeed have "cause" instead of "because", then car could be a little too high a register. (In Europe, at least, it can be translated for and be matched with à jamais.)

N'aie pas peur de l'avenir, parce que je serai là pour toujours.

You could also delete car altogether; I think this borders on style editing, but it has a nice flow. Feelew writes below that having the causal relation spelled out seems to lose some of the warmth and focus attention on the speaker. That could look like:

N'aie pas peur de l'avenir ; je serai là pour toujours.

Finally, your English has "Don't live in fear" but the French you supplied says "Don't be afraid", so if you wanted to capture that first meaning you might try:

Ne vis pas dans la crainte de l'avenir, parce que je serai là pour toujours.
Ne vis pas dans la peur de l'avenir, parce que je serai là pour toujours.

As Stéphane points out below, the negation could also be plus ("anymore", "no longer"), if this word of comfort is given to someone who has already been living in fear up to this point.

Ne vis plus dans la crainte de l'avenir, car je serai là à jamais.

(P.S. Don't forget, as jlliagre mentions below, that if you're addressing more than one person you would use the vous forms: N'ayez pas or Ne vivez pas. I don't think this sentence is likely to be spoken using the polite vous, though, so if it's just one person I'd stick with the tu forms.)


Mix and match from among all these to get the right tone. :)

Disclaimer: I'm not a native speaker and invite any corrections if people disagree with my reading of the nuances or have better suggestions.

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    Tough "en crainte" definitely has some charm, I must say I don't think I've ever heard or read it, and if I did, it wasn't in that type of structure. Also, I think it would be nice to have a variation with an implicit "car" or "parce que" (basically dropping the preposition altogether), it would offer a quicker link between the clauses, flow gracefully, and it is easy for the listener to deduce its hidden presence after being told not to be afraid of something. Apr 11, 2017 at 1:37
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    Whoops! I meant "dans la crainte". Agreed about the deleted conjunction option, though I felt that was style editing rather than translation.
    – Luke Sawczak
    Apr 11, 2017 at 1:51
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    I thought French more than English would tend to drop the conjunction (I'm so embarrassed: mais ou et donc car ni or), so it wouldn't be style editing so much, but I might be wrong. If I were to say something like this to my kids (which of course I wouldn't, BECAUSE I don't know what the fabric of my future is and death might await for me just around the corner), I would definitely not use it in French, though English could easily live with it. Apr 11, 2017 at 9:13
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    More on my feel of it: the original version is meant to be reassuring more than to prove the speaker's value. When the French conjunction is not dropped, it feels more like an analytic demonstration and the feeling of warmth is a little gone through the focus being given to the last clause (attention to the speaker) compared to the first (fear, doubt, insecurity of the hearer). Then again, the same feeling could be transmitted WITH the conjunction, but tone would need to be fined-tuned a lot more to avoid any misinterpretation. Apr 11, 2017 at 9:23
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    Your mention of futur’s association with grammar made me think of how the OP’s version could be used by overly/inappropriately compassionate French teachers trying to reassure their students as they begin the unit on future tenses: “N'aie pas peur du futur, car je serai toujours là. [Par contre, t’auras bientôt de quoi craindre avec le subjonctif!]”
    – Papa Poule
    Apr 11, 2017 at 14:23

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