Concoctions in the thousands?

So my publisher just contacted me about a timeline, to estimate a time of delivery and subsequent publication. I think I'm about half done an extremely rough (and when I say rough, I'm talking 24-grit sandpaper rough) draft of the book. What I've been doing is going through it and doing next to no research and almost no reformulation of phrases. If something makes no sense after a literal translation, I'll try to reformulate it, but it's mostly straight-up literal translation that I'm doing, and then picking out "problem areas" that will need some time and some serious thought to get them sounding nice in English. There's usually at least one "problem area" per page... Last week I was going through it so well, things were coming together quickly and I was feeling super confident, and then I came upon Chapter 18... wham! A brick wall. The entire chapter seemed to be filled with convoluted sentences that wouldn't cooperate and wouldn't contort themselves into comprehensible English whatsoever!

Here's an example:
Les préparations que mon père souhaite concocter dans ses mortiers industriels en inox sont millénaires.

Which is literally translated into: "The preparations that my father wishes to concoct in his industrial stainless steel mortars are in the thousands."

Good grief! what the heck do I do with that? Préparations is referring to concoctions (mixtures?) of opium from the poppies that he grows. An anglophone would never call it a preparation... but what would we call it? And mortar in English is hardly ever used without it's colocution, pestle. I doubt it would be confused with it's homonym in the domain of masonry, but would it be understood? And what the heck do I do with millénaires?


stainless steel mortar (and pestle!)



unprocessed opium



So after I finish this rough copy, I'm going to have to go through it with a fine-toothed comb -- probably many, many times -- reading it for style and comprehension and formulations that sound "too French." I've got a couple Francophone friends who have said that they would help me go over the "problem areas." So it should be done by - I dunno - next spring? I don't think that's too optimistic.