Object has no attribute 'text' when parsing xml

I'm using ElementTree to parse a simple string of xml:

<string xmlns="http://ift.tt/JiuCsN">maison</string>

That's the root. All I want is the contents of that tag, to convert into json. 'translation' is the xml text.

tree = ET.ElementTree(translation)
        root = tree.getroot()

        return root.text

It looks simple enough but it's throwing the " Object has no attribute 'text' " error. What am I doing wrong?