“la parole exportée”

This is the slogan selected by a French furniture store to adorn the T-shirts worn by their store sales staff this Summer.

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In real life, she is an comedian. On screen, she is a policewoman in a TV series.

I never watched the series, but I find it increasingly difficult to escape her, because we have at least one thing in common, our last name, and we now share pages on Google, and Yahoo, and search engines in general. I must say that for a long time, she was the one getting all the blanket.

But the story goes on.

Hardly a day passes, when I meet someone and have to give my name, as it happened today, without the question arising in various forms:

‘Are you a relative of…?’

‘Do you spell it like…?’

‘Like…….’ *wink*

It used to be men who would ask me, with that funny gleam in their eyes. Now women too are asking me.

It’s boring. I tried using it to rate people’s cultural standards. If you ask me about my connection with her, then I rate you as sub par. But that’s unfair, because some people are quite capable of watching popular series about policewomen, and have intelligent conversations on other topics. End of cultural test.

However, it says a lot about being notorious, albeit not a full-fledged celebrity. Over the centuries, several spellings have emerged for my -our- last name, depending on the part of France it originated from. Now everyone seems to know only one spelling: hers -and mine. She is becoming the reference for us all. I am sure that those with a name spelled differently are having a hard time. ‘What, you don’t spell your name like…?’

My question is now: will there be a time, when people will meet her and ask her:

‘Are you a relative of this famous translator?’

‘Do you spell it like the famous translator’s name?’

I doubt it.

Photo courtesy of this site (Italian):

http://www.lavinium.com/italiano/comandante_florent.shtml

I look up my Blog Stats every day and I keep a complete list of search phrases that attracted people to my translator’s blog. They are in a little file in a corner of my desktop, just in case they come in handy at a later stage…

But these search phrases can be weird.

See this one, and I’m not making it up:

“American billionaire buys 395,000 shares”

It’s a weird one, because:

1- I don’t know any American billionaire, or any that I am aware of.

2- I haven’t translated a book by an American billionaire, although I’d love to.

3- I never mentioned any American billionaire in my posts, even with a view to attracting visitors indirectly. Now I might am ;-).

4- If there is an American billionaire who bought 395,000 shares of any stock recently (Société Générale doesn’t count…), he can feel free to contact me directly, as I am interested to explore what we might have in common, that Google/Yahoo/MSN has already spotted, and I haven’t.

5- If there is an American billionaire who bought 395,000 shares of any stock recently (Société Générale doesn’t count…), he can feel free to contact me directly, as I am interested to hear what useful tips (apart from online marketing offers) he would have for an aspiring French billionaire.

Naturally, I googled the phrase, but didn’t find anything conclusive (my URL).

Are search engines entering the match-making market now? Hmmmm… interesting.

Sophia Coppola should be made the Patron Saint of Translators. With only 3 words, she has managed to turn a negative concept into a positive (or at best, neutral) one.

Here is a new twist on her formula, found by the New York Times T Magazine. It will enable you to learn a little Brazilian Portuguese at the same time… but of course I’m sure you don’t need this particular sentence.