Franglais

Lost in translation across the Channel

France might be just across the English Channel from Britain, but Emma Jane Kirby says both nations are still prone to the pitfalls of linguistic misunderstandings.

Last weekend, standing on Pegasus bridge in Normandy for the D-Day celebrations, I was touched to see two classes of French primary school children singing the British national anthem in honour of the veterans.

As I went closer, I realised with delight that while they had got the tune off pat, the words were just slightly off the mark.

Standing tall and proud, the children were calling on the Almighty to "sieve the Queen and her setter, Victoria."

It took me straight back to my own school days when I had learned to sing the nursery rhyme Frere Jacques.

For many years I had warned *Frere Jacques to wake up not because the morning bells were ringing (sonnez les matines), but because there was *"sunny semolina" to be had.

'Yoghurting'

Even in your own language, it is difficult to catch accurately the words of a song if they are not written down in front of you, and in France, which imports most of its music from the US or UK, there is even a word for the appropriation of lyrics.

It is "yaourt", or "to yoghurt".

You start singing confidently... and then trail off into inarticulate "yoghurting" when your lexicon runs dry.

As far as I understand it, so long as you look slightly pained and shut your eyes while you yoghurt, you seem to get away with it.

Some years ago, an Irish friend of mine was on a French exchange in Paris and was hanging out with some of the local teenagers.

Desperate to impress her, they began to reel off their repertoire of English songs.

They said their favourite was a hit by Queen that they had picked up on the radio - I believe the original version was called I Want to Break Free - but unfortunately, the boys knew only the yoghurt version.

Although retaining the original passion, it had lost a little of the sense. It went: I Want a Steak Frites, I Want a Steak Frites.

'Simply hysterical'

Mispronunciations can have embarrassing consequences.

A French friend of mine, preparing a few snacks to hand round at an English drinks party, implored her guests to help themselves to nipples.

My father once returned from a trip to France complaining bitterly that the French had just laughed at him when he had tried to ask for directions to the railway station.

A few probing questions revealed that he had not asked for la gare at all - he had asked for la guerre (the war) - and the locals were simply hysterical at the idea of this white-haired, would-be combatant showing up for duty 65 years too late.

But it can happen to the best of us.

Madame de Gaulle was said to have been lunching with the American ambassador at the time of her husband's retirement when she was asked what she was most looking forward to in the years ahead.

She thought for a moment before announcing boldly: "A penis". A startled hush fell over the table until the former president leant over and said: "My dear, I think it's pronounced 'happiness'."

Speak in French, wrote Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass, when you cannot remember the English for a thing.

But there are many faux amis (false friends) to be wary of in English and French.

'Slip of the ear'

You can flatter a French woman by telling she looks formidable in her new dress, but tell an English woman she looks formidable in her new frock and she will quickly go and change.

And that one wrong word can do untold damage.

In English, looking and watching are two different things. In French, one word - regarder - will cover you for both.

My American friend Janet, on holiday in Montana with her French husband Eddy, suggested he wandered around the shops while she tried on her zillionth pair of shoes.

After a few minutes spent in a bed linen store he was approached by the female assistant who asked him if he needed any help.

"No thanks, I am just watching," he smiled, and was puzzled as she backed off slowly, desperately fumbling for her phone.

The other day I was reading an article in a French newspaper about how we regularly mishear words, particularly in foreign languages, and how that completely changes our comprehension of the conversation.

The writer spoke of a British acquaintance of his who was struck when he arrived in France by how much the French seemed to talk about Johnny Marr, the Smiths' guitarist.

Until the writer realised what his friend was actually hearing was "J'en ai marre (I'm sick of it)".

He went on in his article to inform his readers that the English even had a phrase for such a misunderstanding. It was called, he said confidently, a "slip of the ear*".

Source: BBC News

Idioms:



The idiom is normally a "slip of the tongue". This means that you say something that you didn't intend to say; a mistake in speaking.

A Freudian slip is also something that you say by accident which is different from what you intended to say but seems to show your true thoughts.

Many slips of the tongue / Freudian slips can be heard on you tube; most of them a bit rude. Here is one from Gordon Brown when he was PM and he claims to have "saved the world".

I also made the same mistake as a child with the song "Frere Jacques" Another school favourite was "Alouette". Here is a clip from "Tom and Jerry" in French. I love when the little mouse says "Bonjour Monsieur Pussy Cat".

Meet the world's best chef

On Monday night the world's top chefs and critics met in London for the S.Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants Award and, for the fourth time and third consecutive year, awarded the number one slot to El Bulli. It's an amazing achievement by any standards but perhaps not much of a surprise. In the 21 years since Ferran Adrià became head chef at the restaurant in Roses on the Costa Brava, his rise to success has run parallel with the explosion in fine dining and the attendant phenomenon of gastro-tourism. In the past two decades, a golden age for the restaurant business, Adrià has become the single most significant player in the culinary world, almost universally loved and respected by customers, cooks and critics.

The story of Adrià's rise is well documented. As a teenager he worked as a dishwasher in hotel kitchens and began learning traditional Spanish cuisine. At the age of 19, while drafted for military service, he became a cook and was quickly placed on the personal staff of a high-ranking officer.

At 22 he became a line cook at the already successful El Bulli restaurant, citing as his major motivation the desire to meet the girls who hung out at the nearby beach. Within 18 months he was head chef. The style of cooking Adrià pioneered, along with chefs such as Heston Blumenthal in the UK and Pierre Gagnaire in France, has been termed "molecular gastronomy" though Adrià himself doesn't recognise the title. As he says: "People write that I began molecular cooking but if you ask them no one can define what it is." Instead, he refers to his style, if pressed, as "avant garde" or "deconstructivist".

When nouvelle cuisine first appeared in the 70s, there was a small body of restaurant goers and a tiny coterie of restaurant critics to notice. Today, the pronouncements of restaurant cuisine's most prominent theorist affect an industry that starts in the dining rooms of Michelin-starred restaurants worldwide and spreads through the ever-growing food media - television, books, journalism, a vast subculture of online chef-watchers - and at conferences such as Madrid Fusion. The event itself would have been impossible to conceive of even a decade ago, where chefs exchange ideas, techniques and philosophy, and occasionally present manifestos.

Adrià is usually set up as the brooding, saturnine genius. Though in the dark corner of the hotel bar where we are granted a brief audience just hours before Monday's award ceremony he's dapper and immaculately turned out, with a disarmingly twinkly eyed manner. He speaks no English so his interviews always feature an interpreter, a fact that probably explains the tone of his statements: a complex philosophy of food expressed by a genius in ornate Spanish then mediated through an intense acolyte has an odd quality. About his restaurant, for example, he says: "Being intellectual can be almost anybody, but having soul and emotion ... A man in the fields, collecting things, a normal worker, he can also have feelings, soul and emotion. If you do not work at El Bulli it is impossible to understand." Though he endeavours to clarify: "It is like a building. You can see the building, you can feel the emotion, but you cannot intellectualise the building because you have not studied it. You must study El Bulli to understand it.

And El Bulli is certainly studied by legions of fans and would-be diners around the world. It is closed for six months of each year while Adrià works on the next menu in his laboratory. The restaurant is permanently booked up and currently turns down three-quarters of a million requests for tables every year. At the moment, according to the foodie websites where such things are endlessly discussed, the best way to get a table is to book 10 days' holiday in Barcelona, phone each morning to ensure you're on the cancellations list, keep your mobile switched on and be prepared to drop everything. There are lists of other, merely brilliant, restaurants where you can console yourself while waiting for the call.

To add to the palpable sense of panic among the gastro-pilgrims, there is the persistent, tantalising rumour that he's going to shut the whole place down. "We know about the rumours," Adrià says, "and we're not going to close El Bulli." There is a deft pause before he continues: "But every single day we must face the challenge to reinvent the model through which we express ourselves. In the end, the important thing is what we say. Perhaps the model may change.

To those outside the food world, Adrià is a gift - the wacky food science makes for great headlines. There's always a ready one-liner in his apparently absurd notion of serving lunch as a foam - even though he says he stopped doing this in 1998 - and it may well be true that Adrià's work will have little long-term influence on the way we eat at home.

But his real coup has been much more significant than the science tricks. He has, perhaps unintentionally, become the figurehead of a global rebellion against the culinary hegemony of France. Though brilliant young chefs all over the world were innovating frantically, the measure against which they tested themselves was always classical French cuisine, until Adrià's scientific approach, inspired by the work of, among others, French physical chemist Hervé This, who led Adrià to deconstruct ingredients and dishes.

Deconstructing recipes and ingredients by definition makes the combinations of a traditional canon irrelevant. Suddenly the world's best food was not about 400 years of French tradition but ingredients, technique and creativity. At the conclusion of his long acceptance speech at the awards last night, Adrià invited his compatriot Spanish chefs onto the stage at the Freemasons Hall in London to celebrate the fact that their country had more chefs in the top 10 than any other - even France. It's no wonder chefs love Adrià. His personality validates them as artists, his stature puts reviewers and critics in their place, his technique opens new possibilities and his non-Frenchness gives chefs of every nationality an equal chance to succeed. Adrià became a standard around which innovating chefs could cluster, giving restaurant cooking a new direction.

In a 2006 speech, he said: "One day people will come to my restaurant not for nourishment, but for an experience," a statement that seemed to open a whole new territory, beyond food, into which creative chefs can expand. And creativity, never commercialism, is what, he says, drives him. "It is impossible to combine the goal of making money with making people happy with what we do," he says. And yet nor does he care about making everybody happy. "In the end, what is important is what you have inside yourself, what you believe - not the opinion of 10 million."

Because he's Spanish, because of his creativity and his iconoclasm, Adrià is often placed in the tradition of Gaudí, Dali or Picasso. These might be useful comparisons but, like many creative people recognised in their own lifetimes, Adrià has also come to represent something more: his importance reaches far beyond the food he can create and the diners he can please by serving it.

As he held aloft his award on Monday night and gave his thanks and dedications, it seemed that, like a film star whose presence somehow transcends his performances, he has become an icon, representing how the whole of the "fine dining" world see themselves.

Yet with his creativity and cheerful disregard for convention he could at any moment turn his back on the whole of the industry, and it would only increase their regard for him. And might he? Could the most important chef in generations succeed in deconstructing himself out of running a restaurant?

"But, of course," he answers, smiling, "El Bulli is not a restaurant. We don't make any money. The books, the hotel, the other businesses, they make money. But it would not be possible to make money and continue to do what we do at El Bulli. We want to experiment, to please people, but we would never change something we do because of what people say. Is that a restaurant?"

Source: Guardian

Vocabulary Focus

Find the meaning of "to turn your back on" and test your knowlege of body idioms.

Formula One / Sport Idioms

Even if, like me, you don't follow motor-racing as a rule; you can't deny that this year's Formula One has been exciting. Here is a summary of what happened from the viewpoint of the BBC:

Raikkonen pips Hamilton to title

Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen won his first Formula One drivers' championship as Lewis Hamilton's bid came to a dramatic end in the Brazilian Grand Prix.

Hamilton's attempt to make history by winning the title in his maiden season ended when he finished only seventh.

His challenge was ended when problems with his McLaren dropped him to the back of the field early on.

His team-mate Fernando Alonso's hopes were dashed as he finished third behind Raikkonen's team-mate Felipe Massa.

Finn Raikkonen, who has won two more races than anyone else this season, won the championship with 110 points, with Alonso and Hamilton tied on 109 points.

Hamilton ended the season in second place on countback, with one more second-place race finish than Alonso.

Things started to go wrong for Hamilton from the start. As Massa eased into the lead from pole position, the Englishman was slow away from his second place on the grid, and was passed by Raikkonen before the first corner.

Then, as they entered the first turn, Alonso drew alongside Hamilton on the outside, claiming the inside line and third place as they went into the second part of the chicane.

Hamilton then unwisely and unnecessarily tried to re-pass his team-mate on the outside into the Subida da Lago corner at the end of the back straight.

He got onto the slippery outside of the track, and slid off into the run-off area, rejoining in eighth place.

Raikkonen sensed Hamilton's early mistake might provide him with an opening to snatch victory.

"I got a good start and was side by side with Felipe," ssaid Raikkonen. "But the main thing was not to race with him, but get past Hamilton.

"I then saw Hamilton go off and I knew maybe we had a chance."

In itself, that error was not enough to end his hopes of becoming champion, but worse was soon to come.

Hamilton quickly set about regaining places, but ran into more problems on lap eight, when he slowed almost to a halt as his car slipped out of gear.

The gearbox electronics corrected themselves, enabling Hamilton to get back on his way, but by then had lost more than 40 seconds, and was at the back of the field.

The 22-year-old spent the rest of the afternoon fighting through the field, desperately trying to gain enough places to stop one of his rivals beating him to the world championship.

In an attempt to ease his task, McLaren chose a radical three-stop strategy, the thinking presumably being that with a lighter car he would find it easier to overtake his rivals.

The teams have to use both of two types of tyre during the race.

And McLaren chose to get the slower, softer tyre out of the way early with a short second stint.
That way, he would be on the faster tyre at the end of the race when nearly all the other drivers were on the slower one.

But the strategy did not pay off.

Hamilton did get up into the points during his third stint but, once Raikkonen assumed the lead after passing Massa during the second pit-stop period, the Englishman needed to finish fifth to stay ahead of the Finn.

And although he drove flat out to the end of the race he simply ran out of time.

Alonso's hold on the title he has held for two years ended in a damp squib.

The Spaniard was never in contention for victory in a race that was dominated by the Ferraris.

And although he had the edge on everyone else, third place was not enough to stay ahead of Raikkonen in the standings.

Have you ever been to see an important sporting event? What for you is the most memorable sporting occassion? Why? What happened?

It's difficult to start work in a new department but once you learn the ropes, you'll be fine.

There are lots of sport idioms, such as the previous example, in English. Take a look at the following list of Sport Idioms. Choose ones that you think will be useful, create some examples and then post them here.