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Posts Tagged ‘french’

  1. Proust

    April 8, 2008 by dafyd

    Don’t get me wrong: Marcel Proust was a genius. His works are terribly important in the context of literary history. But what the Dickens is he on about here..?

    But, when nothing of an old past endures, after the death of the people, after the destruction of the things, alone, more frail but more alive, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, on top of the remains of everything else, bearing unfaltering, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.

    To be fair, once you work out what he’s talking about, it’s quite a beautiful sentiment about the power of taste and smell to bring back long-forgotten memories. But seriously: 17 commas in 65 words? That’s overkill. “Their almost impalpable droplet”? Huh?

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  2. Mistranslation du jour

    July 8, 2007 by dafyd

    I spotted this at Montreal’s central bus station yesterday:

    Screenshot of a Montreal bus timetable screen

    [Clicky for bigger at Flickr]

    Those crazy Canadians took the word “guichet”, which can mean both “ticket window” and “wicket”, and picked the wrong translation.

    Well, I found it funny, anyway.

    [More of my Montreal photos at Flickr]

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  3. Nine hours [19/48]

    July 29, 2006 by dafyd

    So, we’re nine hours into the Blogathon, and reading back over my last few posts, I can tell I’m getting tired. My prose has started to get a tad rubbish, and some sentences don’t even make sense. Bother.

    I’ve not been sleeping terribly well for the last few nights, mainly because of the heat and my hayfever, so I’m coming into this at somewhat of a disadvantage. I think I’ll move downstairs in a bit to be closer to the coffee…

    Anyhoo, here’s something that dropped into my RSS reader:

    Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has banned all foreign words from government and cultural agencies. They are now to be replaced with clumsy made-up Persian words.

    This may be new in Iran, but it’s something that’s been going on for years in France. In the late 1700s, Cardinal Richelieu established the Académie Française to monitor the French language, and especially to ensure that it didn’t become too threatened by English.

    In the 1990s, the French government enacted the loi Toubon (the “Allgood Law”), which forced all media to be in French. Any English used, for example in adverts, had to be subtitled in French. The DGLF (Délégation générale à la langue française) regularly updates its list of forbidden English words, recently expanded to include computers and the internet. This does, of course, create a huge number of stupid phrases… for “webcasting”, for example, the French equivalent is “diffusion systématique sur la toile”. A DVD, of all things, is a “disque numérique polyvalent”.

    I think somewhere someone has lost the plot, somewhat. Creating long French equivalents isn’t going to make people use them…

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