Traduction d'enfer

Score another strikethrough. Yesterday I finished the Translation From Hell. That's what I'd started calling it for the past few weeks that I've been working on it. It's an article that will appear in an edited volume, and it is BAD. Bad as in I've read many undergrad term papers that are much better than this. It was written by a senior scholar at another university, and I rather impetuously and foolishly volunteered to translate it from French to English over two years ago when I was an RA for the project that is producing the volume. I thought it would be an easy way to get a couple lines on my c.v. at a time when I didn't yet have any articles of my own to boast. I've been putting it off since then because there was no pressure from the volume editor and I had better things to do (like write my dissertation in just six months). I had no idea what I was getting myself in for. The volume editor obviously recognized how bad the original version was and told me to try to make it better, and I did make some editing suggestions along the way, but short of rewriting the entire article from scratch and changing about 90% of the content, there's no easy way to make it better through sheer translation alone. I'm so relieved that the translation is done, but somehow I fear that my relationship to this particular piece of writing is not yet over. I'm giving it to the editor tomorrow, but I can't give it back to the author--who thinks it's good and has been hounding me for months about how excited he is to see fruits of my labour--because it is full of red edits that I've made which I'm sure he will think are unjustified. I'm supposed to be a translator (despite not being formally trained), yet I'm finding myself in the role of editor of a particularly problematic author too. Any suggestions?