Mistranslations

Mistranslations
Since I've been here I've learnt much that I didn't previously know about nuances, false friends (in language) and outright faux pas. That would probably be true of any other country I visited where I tried to speak the local lingo. I remember being warned years ago never to say in the USA that I really needed a fag. I'd probably get disapproval there either way now but of a different sort. However, I'm living in France and the perceptions are more frequent and often more subtle. All this comes to mind because of my recent spot of translation.

There are the obvious and generally well-known false friends such as that “une journée” has nothing to with a journey. However, there are also many much subtler differences. I wonder how many English tourists here have innocently asked for “la toilette” when what they wanted was “les toilettes”. The former is what women (mostly) do when making themselves ready to go out; the latter is what are also known as loos, even if there is only one of them. Natural language has enough redundancy, and most people enough flexibility, to ensure a correct interpretation in this case and face to face contact (an agonised grimace?) helps enormously.

There are other subtleties which consist not of what is right or wrong but what people say and don't say. I was corrected recently when I stated a time as something like “six heures quinze” meaning quarter past six in the evening. It's perfect French and perfectly understandable but, I was told, the French wouldn't say that. They would say either “six heures et quart” or “dix-huit heures quinze”. Why? Nobody at first could explain but then we worked out that you either had to be general “a quarter past six” or specific “15 minutes past six in the evening” (24-hour clock). In theory, they are pretty much the same; you just don't mix the two in practice.

That reminds me of a joke my friend Steve tells about a French man presented with a practical solution to some problem. He apparently rejected the solution saying: “That may be all very well in practice but it will never work in theory”. Maybe you have to with the French for some time to understand how representative of attitudes that is. But I digress.

Most of the time you can murder the gender of nouns in French and get away with it; even the French themselves sometimes get genders wrong. What I continue to find confusing is when nouns take account of a person's gender and when they don't. In primary schools the gender of the teacher is acknowledged: “instituteurs” and “institutrices”; in secondary schools it's not: there are no “professeuses”. Various people can have the title “maître” but there are no “maîtresses” among them; “maîtresses” are something else.

My classic illustration of the problem of getting gender wrong is if you were to utter the phrase “Ma foi! C'est un scandale”; this can be roughly translated as: Good Heavens! It's a scandal. Switch the genders and you get “Mon foie! C'est une scandale” which translates roughly as: My liver! It's a corset. I'm not sure that any amount of natural language redundancy or eye to eye contact would get you out of that one.

However, it's real-life howlers that I love best. In my latest translation venture, the wretched translator who preceded me had translated the rich red colour of the Chateau wine “couleur de rubis” as rubbish in colour. Not exactly the virtue that the chateau was trying to extol in its wine.

Friend Steve has encountered a similar mistranslation in a restaurant. The word “plat” in French translates as either a dish, in a menu, or as the adjective flat. Unfortunately in this case, the word flat in English has a couple of meanings too. So the restaurant Steve went into proudly proclaimed in it's English translation that it had a flat of the day and even flats to take away. The mind boggles.