Words, Words, Words

Searching For Words

One of the English who have second houses here, Tony, said that his daughter was getting married next week to a Frenchman, in France, and so he had to give a wedding speech in French. Would I go over it for him? Of course I agreed and duly went through it, picking up the odd grammatical error, which probably wouldn't have noticed anyway when spoken, and the occasional translation error. In fact, I found only two and even one of those I wasn't sure of. The obvious one was latest being translated as “le plus tard”, which it could have been but in this case what Tony meant was “plus récent”, exactly the opposite. So much for word for word translation; it's the semantics that count.

The other mistranslation was “annonce” for the speech he had to make. I was sure it should be “discours” but got a sudden doubt; weddings are special occasions and special occasions often have special vocabularies. For instance, the meal after a wedding in England is called a wedding breakfast when it's clearly never a breakfast, unless the couple get married at dawn. “Une annonce” is an announcement, which could be appropriate for an engagement but the couple would be married by the time Tony gave his speech. Anyway, at the last mussels and chips evening at the Bar du Pont I was sitting next to friend Dominique's sister and asked her to go through the speech with me. She cleared up the doubts and improved the phrasing.

I also wanted to pass the speech, with my corrections, through someone French anyway because I am aware that it is only too easy to create a French sentence that is perfectly grammatical but just isn't what the French would say. Dominique's sister pointed out a perfect example of that. Tony had mentioned “un bébé miraculeux”, referring to a grandchild whose mother had previously undergone radiation therapy. That made perfect sense to me but it seems you can't have a miraculous baby in French, at least not without a virgin birth beforehand. The required word in French is “inespéré”, meaning not unhoped for but which you didn't dare hope for.

The chase for words didn't end there. At the pizza evening this week I was chatting with Jacques and Claudine when we somehow got onto the question of fire. The French have the word “ininflammable” and I don't think the word uninflammable exists in English; if it does, it shouldn't because it's too ugly. So what is the word in English? I asked Alex and Pauline, the only other English people there, and they couldn't think of a word. In the end it was Jacques who came up with answer; he remembered seeing “fire-proof” on some packaging.

Gardens

Jacques, Claudine and I got around to chatting about gardens and Claudine, as ever, was very complimentary about mine and said she didn't like the French way or gardening, only the English way. I've remarked before that I don't think the style of gardening in large French châteaus works in small spaces but think it does for the châteaus. It then occurred to me that we don't usually have the French château style in large English country houses. We tend to break up the large landscapes into smaller areas for the gardens and create different types of small gardens, often walled. So we really are a nation of small gardeners.