Stop/ Arrêt Sign

I’m los­ing my French. Too bad I’m a French teacher.

It all started when I moved to Ottawa. The city is in Ontario but the French-speaking province of Que­bec is only min­utes away, across the Ottawa River. As a result, roughly 50% of the pop­u­la­tion speaks Eng­lish and 30% of the pop­u­la­tion speaks French. Besides, Ottawa’s pri­mary employer is the fed­eral gov­ern­ment and civil ser­vants must be bilin­gual at some level (hey, that’s my job !). All in all, the city is pretty bilingual.

I spent the first cou­ple of years immersed in the Eng­lish world: I worked and lived in Eng­lish. It’s only when I started work­ing as a French teach­ing that I dis­cov­ered Ottawa’s French side.

Franco-Ontarians, once called “warm corpses” and “dead ducks” by famous Que­bec sep­a­ratists, use a lot of Eng­lish loan­words when they speak French. “J’vais dri­ver mon pick-up”, “can­celler un rendez-vous”, “sched­uler un appoint­ment”, «l’air–con­ndi­tionné », ” appli­quer pour une posi­tion” etc. are com­mon sen­tences in Ottawa – and are widely under­stood by both French and Eng­lish speak­ers. Peo­ple still make fun of me when I say “park­ing”, the “French” word for “park­ing lot” though. “Parisian French has so many Angli­cisms !”. Yeah. Right.

These Angli­cisms led to a lot of mis­un­der­stand­ings before I finally mas­tered them. My first week in the school, I asked a co-worker what she did for the week-end.

– Qu’est-ce que t’as fait ce week-end? (“what did you do this week-end ?”)
–J’ai pris une marche. (“I tripped down the stairs… “, accord­ing to my French !)
– Oh, ma pau­vre ! Ça va quand même? (“oh, poor you… are you okay?”)
– Ben oui, t’aime pas pren­dre des marches (“why wouldn’t I ? Don’t you like tak­ing walks ?”)

That’s where I real­ized she trans­lated directly from Eng­lish « to take a walk » and she didn’t actu­ally tripped down the stairs.

My stu­dents didn’t help either. Teach­ing means explain­ing, repeat­ing, dis­sect­ing a lan­guage. It also means that by the end of the first month, you’ll pick on everyone’s French… or Eng­lish. Pro­nun­ci­a­tion, con­ju­ga­tion, idiomatic expres­sions, vocab­u­lary, spelling, what­ever. I cor­rect Feng all the time, even though his Eng­lish is by far bet­ter than mine. I cor­rect other teach­ers, who cor­rect me in return. When I read my mail, I men­tally rephrase Canada Rev­enue Agency prose and I spell-check my Visa bill. And I the end, I don’t even know what’s cor­rect any­more. Prepo­si­tions and tenses mix up in my head. Should I use the sub­junc­tive here ? Who knows !

But above all, some North-American con­cepts just can’t be trans­lated in French.You may have hear of the French auto­mo­tive indus­try. You should have any­way (irony, irony…). The biggest car known to French is the equiv­a­lent of a very very small SUV, man­u­fac­tured by Renault : the Espace. The words “SUV” or “Pick-up” don’t make any sense in French. It just doesn’t exist. So when­ever I want to talk about a SUV, I just say “a big Espace”. Close enough, but not a great translation.

And how would I trans­late “food court” (food stalls in a big shop­ping mall ?), “hash browns” (pan-fried potato pieces ?) or “pou­tine” (a dish of French fries topped with cheese curds and cov­ered with hot gravy ?)…?

The expres­sion “garage-sale” can be trans­lated in French by “vide gre­nier” (lit­er­ally, “empty-attic”). Logic. French apart­ments often have an attic but rarely have a garage! How­ever, the “vide-greniers” are by far less pop­u­lar than their “garage-sale” coun­ter­part. Good trans­la­tion but a dif­fer­ent concept.

Man­age­ment, mar­ket­ing, lead­er­ship are North-American con­cepts, imported in Europe. French kept the Eng­lish words but pro­nounce them the French way (yes, it does sound sex­ier). Québec trans­lated “man­age­ment” by “ges­tion et admin­is­tra­tion”, and I’ve heard of “mer­ca­tique” for “mar­ket­ing”. How­ever, “lead­er­ship” just doesn’t have a French translation.

Some­times, you just can’t fit the North Amer­i­can logic and way of life in French. I’m lost in translation.

Related arti­cles:

1. Lost In Franglais
2. Bro­ken English
3. Two Soli­tudes And One Loneliness
4. From Teacher To Student
5. Whoui Spik Inglish