“la parole exportée”

From the green lush land of Normandy, working for one of the richest companies with operations the world over, writing about poverty does feel a little strange and remote.

Yet poverty is a reality that we in the developed world cannot ignore, if only because we are in the minority.

I am grateful that in my own work, apart from my personal commitments, I have the opportunity to help poor children in the developing world. Maybe not this week. But at other times, I can help.

Absolute poverty is a state that prevents people from feeding well, from being healthy, from receiving an education and from living a decent life. Poverty doesn’t just mean that you don’t have money, enough money to buy the things you want. Poverty prevents you from getting out of your hole. It breeds inequality and lots of other evils.

You don’t need to answer the question publicly, but stop and think: what did you do recently to help people get out of poverty?

Have a nice day.

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As a French translator, I am constantly on the lookout for innovative or simply intelligent ways to fight some of the most pervasive “anglicisms”. This is NOT a rear-guard battle to protect the “purity” of the French language. Quite often, the word-for-word translation of some English phrases into French only provides meaningless copy, and if your client’s aim is to convince French-speaking people to buy their stuff, be it products or services, or simply to try and influence decisions, you’d better make sure that their message is explicit and their copy “speaks” to people, not just to their assumed knowledge of English.

Which is why, as I was pondering how to translate “make a difference” for a poster today, I hit Google and found this wonderful service from Quebec’s Banque de dépannage linguistique:

http://66.46.185.79/bdl/gabarit_bdl.asp?id=2617

I am very appreciative of the work done by our French-speaking Canadian colleagues. Too often, Canadian French is derided in France, because in some respects their French has taken a different course to ours. But they are also making a more conscious effort to preserve our common language.

“To make a difference” is a good example. I often see this used and/or translated in France as “faire une différence”, a straight and meaningless translation. Some people go for “faire la différence”, which has different meanings. Switching “little” words, a common mistake, might sound like a small inconsequential change, but it isn’t, similar to another frequent example, “mettre à jour” and “mettre au jour”. “Mettre à jour” means “to update,” “to change,” “mettre au jour” means “to place in broad daylight,” “to uncover”.

I do sympathize with non-French speakers who find these nuances difficult to grasp. When we learn English, we have similar problems with pospositions. Think for instance of the difference between “to give in” and “to give up”.

OK, languages change over time, and maybe in 10 or 20 years’ time, these mistakes will have become mainstream. But for the time being, they are not, and I feel that my duty as a translator is not to drive this kind of change.

I’m reminded of the following anecdote by a blog post written by Werner Patels.

It goes to show how obsessed with acronyms translators can be. Once upon a time, I interpreted at a rather hard meeting and at breaktime, we were lucky to get hold of the printout of the next presentation.

On one page, there was a diagram of a process, with, right in the middle of the page, in big bold evenly-spaced letters, this *acronym*:

E C H E C

So I asked the speaker: What does this stand for?

He looked at me with a funny look, and seemed a little uneasy.

So I asked again, in my best professional voice.

So he laughed. What? You don’t know what ECHEC means?

That was NOT an acronym, it was a REAL word!

Ever heard of the word ‘failure’? That’s what ‘échec’ means. If you didn’t do this properly, the process failed.

Of course I knew the word. But when you have very little time to talk to a speaker before his presentation, you tend to go for very technical words and acronyms.

What a laugh! (and how I hate to look so stupid! ;-))

BBC Radio 4’s Today program has a segment on this topic:

“A group of literary figures, broadcasters and politicians are campaigning to keep some unusual words in the Collins English Dictionary. Elaine Higgleton, of publishers Harper Collins Dictionaries, and Poet Laureate Andrew Motion discuss whether this is a ‘niddering’, or cowardly, response to archaic language.”

Those who publish dictionaries do that every year: they sift through the language and every year, it is reported that a few little-used words have been removed from dictionaries for the general public, and new more widely-used words have been introduced. Both choices typically generate some criticism.

At the same time, we have the French Academy documenting the French language at snail speed (but getting there).

More importantly for us translators, there is the FranceTerme website that tells you all about the new French terms that the official Terminology Commission has validated for you to use. The latest available glossary is a English-French-Chinese glossary on the Beijing Olympic and Paralympic Games.

But our language, like all others, has a life of its own, and doesn’t always feel like taking orders from a government department or the French Academy.

You need a lot of faith to be an official terminologist, because language cannot be restricted to what a group of people, however distinguished they may be, are telling you is OK to use. Inventing new terms is tricky. I listen to a business radio most of the time, and never heard the term “investisseur providentiel” mentioned once (for business angel).

My guess is that it doesn’t ’speak’ to the people in the industry. In common everyday language, “providentiel” has a supernatural connotation, and one of unexpected benefit.

Somehow this doesn’t sound exactly the same as business angel.

Or does it?