“la parole exportée”

The interview of Abha Dawesar here was translated by me.

Let me tell you about its background, it will show how diversified, and sometimes unusual, our sources of work and connections can be.

This year’s Salon du Livre (the Paris French Book Fair) featured India as Special Guest. Tirthankar Chanda, the author of the interview, is a literary critic for several French newspapers, a journalist on Radio France International and also a professor of Indian Literature and Bengali at INALCO, where I was recently learning Bengali. He is also an expert on African literature and literature of the South. He would probably qualify as a ‘/’ slash careerist!

One day at INALCO, he approached me and asked me if I could translate this interview for him. I was surprised at first, and I must say, a little nervous. Tirthankar Chanda, being Indian, is an expert of English and he writes perfect French. For this reason, and because I translate technical texts mainly, I felt a little uncomfortable, but I ended up accepting the job. The next two hours saw me at INALCO’s library, toiling away as if I was taking my first translation exam, and I’ve been working for almost 30 years!

When you read the text of the article, if you read French, you see that it’s fairly simple. But I checked everything at least 3 times, checked the grammar, the sentences, everything, and re-read the whole thing about 5 times. Never mind. A typo made its way into the copy, and when I re-read it just now, it made me shameful. It wasn’t mine. Still. There’s my name at the bottom. The evil perfectionist in me is grinding its teeth.

Your bonus: For an excellent presentation of Indian literature in French, follow this link.

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… but a very pretty gift I will hang next to my desk in 2008: a month-by-month calendar with 12 photos taken by me, or others, of those who support me (pets included! ;-)).

A sweet idea that will take me along from month to month.

Apart from that, NO work today. At last one quiet day.

Greetings to all!

A picture is worth a thousand words, they say.

For those who have the time or the courage to check this blog today, this picture from my collection. Again very amateurish, but it’s the real thing. I took the scintillating Eiffel Tower from a bateau-mouche.

Thank you for being around, and I hope you will have an enjoyable day.

I came across this excellent article this morning, the Featured Story of the Natural History Magazine. It reminded me of the research I did for a previous post on Francophony.

The author, Sarah Grey Thomason, the William J. Gedney Collegiate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan and former president of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, tells us that at least half of our planet’s 6,000 languages will be lost by the end of this century. Of course, if you speak one of the major languages, there’s no need to worry, these are probably to stay. Although I might say that one can never tell what the future has in store for us.

‘Losing a language’ may have different meanings. This article points to the fact that not all ‘dead’ languages are really dead, as in totally extinct. Latin is given as an example here. It is widely thought to be a dead language, because hardly anyone speaks it actively now. But it is not dead the way the language featured in the article will become extinct when the last person to speak it dies. Latin is very much alive, through the Romance languages descended from it.

But the most challenging implications are that if you are a member of a Native American tribe, the chances are that your children have been taught in English, and that they will speak it. So your language becomes extinct when you die.

This reminded me that within UNESCO, the question of linguistic diversity, including teaching and learning in native languages, is taken very seriously. In Africa alone, it is estimated that between 1,200 and 2,500 languages are competing, and surveys have found that very young children acquire better skills, and achieve better grades later, when they have been taught in their native languages. It is a policy issue for countries with a varied ethnic profile, where different languages are used. Yet, contrary to the view we might have from the North, it is essential for the future of literacy and development of those countries.