Our linguist of the month was chosen following a chance encounter I had with him on a recent visit to Barcelona. Àlvaro works as a tour guide at Gran Teatre del Liceu (Opera House of Barcelona), which is situated on the Rambla, and has served as an arts center and one of the cultural landmarks of the city since 1847. The Opera House provides excellent tours of its magnificent buildings for groups and individuals, in Catalan, Spanish, English and French. When I went with my wife to the Opera House to book a tour, I was greeted by Alvaro, and I was immediately impressed with the high standard of his spoken English. In conversation with him, I learned about his love of languages, developed at an early age, and his impressive CV, which includes a stint of study at the Université de Lyon 2.

Although only 21 years old, Alvaro Mira has acquired a solid knowledge of Spanish, English and French (in addition to his mother-tongue, Catalan) and I predict a very successful career for him in some field of language.

Jonathan G.

J.G.:  Where were you born and which language did you speak at home.

A.M.: I was born in Barcelona and spoke Catalan to my parents and Spanish to my grandparents and great aunt.

J.G.:  At what age was your first exposure to another language?

A.M.: At the age of 3 we were taught some basic English vocabulary at school, but it was only at the age of 12 that serious instruction was provided, and I complemented my English studies with private lessons.

J.G.: What motivated you to study English so seriously at that age?

A.M.: Initially my strong interest in English was triggered by the fact that I was a fan of Bruno Mars, Joe Jonas and other American artists, but after I outgrew that stage, my love of English remained.

J.G.:  Were you able to practice your English outside of Spain?

A.M.: Yes, after hosting a Swedish student in Barcelona, I travelled to Forsheda, Sweden in 2013 and again in 2014, where I was a guest student for more than a week each time. My common language with my Swedish guest and then with my Swedish hosts was English. Between the two visits I gained a First Certificate in English from the University of Cambridge. I did two English immersion stints in California with Cultural Homestay International. That involved taking classes in the mornings and engaging in social activities in the afternoons. Also, I got to speak English with the American host family I was living with. It is so much easier to learn a language when you are having fun. Later I tutored students aged 12-18 in English.

J.G.:  How did you acquire your fluency in French?

A.M.: I found French to be relatively easy when I studied it in high school. This was partly due to the common roots of Catalan and French, which make French closer to Catalan in some respects than French is to Spanish. But to build on my basic knowledge, I was applied for and was awarded an Erasmus Scholarship to study French-Spanish translation and Grammaire contrastive pour hispanophones.  I am currently studying English and French Translation and Interpreting.

J.G.:  What stage have you reached in your studies and what do you have planned?

A.M.: Since 2015 I have been pursuing a Bachelor’s Degree in Translation and Interpreting in English and French at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Once I obtain the degree, I plan to do a Masters, but I have not yet decided in exactly which field. I find legal translation and multimedia translation particularly interesting, although interpreting is something I am very comfortable doing too.

J.G.:  What do you think of Machine Translation?

A.M.: I do not believe that it will ever replace humans, given the subtleties and nuances of each language and the need to bridge them. It is true that from the point of view of a translator, Machine Translation may be seen as a work tool. However, it should never be considered as the only means for translation.

J.G.:  In a recent edition of The Economist, there is an article on Catalonia, which ends with the words: “What is clearer is that Catalan society remains split down the middle.” Do you believe that this situation has a language component to it? Would the situation be worse if Catalan did not serve as a unifying force between both camps of Catalans?

A.M.: Recent studies have proven that those who have Catalan as a mother tongue have a greater propensity to seek independence from Spain than those who do not have Catalan as a mother tongue. As far as I am concerned, I would like to see the Catalan language as a tool for everyone, not just for a few.  I think everyone should be able to use both languages irrespective of their origin or political orientation.

.

L'auteur : Joe Lurie Creative Consulting and Coaching Across Cultures, Communicating across Cultures

PerceptionAndDeception.com  CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (May 8, 2015)

reviewed by : Donna Scott, Los Angeles

One of the pleasures of reading literature is the discovery of how much alike we humans are in our universal needs, desires and fears; consider the writer's mantra: the more specific you make it, the more universal it is. However, messages from the news and social media, TV and movies seem to belie such shared universality. Citizens of a world tied together in a global economy, across a planet whose borders are disappearing, seem to be locked in a death-grip of cultural identity crises that doesn't seem to be loosening anytime soon.

Arguably, no education is complete without the learning of cross-cultural communication skills. The business of cross-cultural studies does indeed exist, fulfilling the necessity for understanding the niceties of cultural differences as nuanced as the focus of one's eyes during a conversation. Joe Lurie is a cross-cultural trainer who has spent decades studying, training, speaking and observing these intricacies. He serves as Director Emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley's International House, is a former Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya, where he says it all began for him, and has directed programs in France, Kenya, and Ghana for the School for International Training.

He has written an aptly titled book: Perception and Deception, A Mind Opening Journey Across Cultures. A slim book of just six chapters, it is crammed with anecdotes and proverbs to prove his point that "seeing can often be deceiving," and "that by relying on one's experiences and filters, a perception can often be a deception."

In his first chapter, Lurie goes back to his first immersion in the culture of Kenyans during his beginning days as a volunteer of with the Peace Corps. After hosting dinner at his house for three African friends, he was perplexed that not only did they not thank him after an evening of food and lively conversation, but they also didn't reciprocate his hospitality. He later discovered that Kenyans' doors are always open and invitations weren't considered necessary. Joe also learned he was mistaken in asking if they would like something to eat or drink (always declined by the guest), only to discover Kenyan guests never wanted to appear greedy, so food and drink should automatically be served by the host.

A young African would address even a newly introduced female elder as grandma out of respect. If a teenager in this youth obsessed Western culture presumed to call a strange older woman grandma, he would likely be met with indignation for daring such a put-down.

The University of California, Berkeley's International House, a residential and program center for students from around the world, promoting intercultural experiences and leadership skills, is the setting for many of Lurie's anecdotes. Their alumni include ambassadors, political leaders, royal families, Nobel Laureates and UN staff and officials.

For the past 85 years many young people were given their first exposure to people not only outside their own cultures, but also beyond the barrier of their socio-economic classes. A Mexican student whose father swept floors in a shoe factory had never before mingled with people rich enough to discuss ski trips to Switzerland and beach houses; Turkish and Armenian students socialized, a shocked student from Hong Kong had his first encounter with an African-American from Detroit when they were assigned as roommates; Asian students ate together in the brightly lit section of the dining room and not the more softly lit area, not, as it was later discovered, because they didn't want to mix, but because they considered seeing their food as an important part of enjoying a meal.

Food plays a major role in emphasizing cultural differences and biases: A physicist from Shanghai was dismayed that turkey was being served, claiming that it was an animal kept in zoos; two women from Kuwait were upset because there was a dog under the adjoining table in the dining room because for many Muslims dogs are unclean and not welcome inside the house.

The section of the book that Lurie devotes to culture through the prism of language slows down enough so that one can pause and absorb the power of the role it plays. The amount of violence in the US media and the ease of purchasing guns is shocking to many foreigners. "With only 5% of the world's population, US Americans now possess about 50% of the world's guns," he says.

He examines how US history with guns and violence has permeated their everyday language in ways often taken for granted. Most speakers are unaware when they say they value the "straight shooter," are wary of those who "shoot their mouths off," caution colleagues to avoid "shooting themselves in the foot," and counsel not to "shoot the messenger." Friends should "shoot us an email," give it "your best shot," "stick to your guns," and "do a bang up job."

As a contrast, the importance of food in the French culture is reflected in the language: Francois Hollande has been called "fragile strawberry," a "wobbly flan," a "marshmallow" by his opponents. C'est pas la fin des haricots (it's not the end of the string beans) is the French way of saying, "it's not the end of the world." A nice person in French is c'est une crème (it's cream). Lurie's buffet of wide offerings using the full array of fruits, vegetables, meat, dairy drives home how infused a culture's language is with what it values.

If, like me, you find yourself growing impatient for him to address today's far-reaching threats facing cultures slamming up against one another, you will be pleased with Chapter Five's Minefields and Mind-Openers in the News. It begins with common marketplace mistranslations in world-wide products to demonstrate the linguistic challenges that face global products. The launch of a British company's Bundh curry sauce means "ass" in Punjabi; Microsoft's Bing search engine sounds like "illness" in Mandarin Chinese, but can also mean "pancake;" Honda's Fitta car means "female genitalia" in Swedish, while Ford's Pinto translates to "small penis" in Brazilian Portuguese slang.

From there forward, this chapter covers serious diplomatic cultural issues caused by cultural misunderstandings; faux-pas are made by President Obama, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, as well as diplomats around the world, even while those people have at their fingertips, experts to coach them in these areas. Tragically, a few Afghani Army soldiers serving with NATO troops killed more than 50 Western soldiers in 2012, in part due to the lack of cultural knowledge that created distrust; brochures in their language became available to help understand troubling Western behaviors.

The time Lurie devotes to the kinds of cultural differences posing an existential threat to our world is well-spent. Here, Joe Lurie's illustrations are mirrored in today's tragic headlines, and we can only nod with sad recognition. It's only in retrospect that I consider that perhaps it was wise of him to first spend so much time on the micro, often amusing cross-cultural differences, so we can better appreciate how small gradations of ignorance left unattended can mutate into catastrophic proportions.

 

By the same author: Bicycling in the Yogurt: The French Fixation

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

In March, Grant Hamilton,  translator, author of Les trucs d'anglais qu'on a oublié de vous enseigner and regular collaborator with Le Mot juste en anglais, spoke with David Crystal, one of the world’s most eminent English-language linguists [*]. Below is a shortened transcript of their conversation.

 

David Crystal The Interviewee

Grant Hamilton The Interviewer

 

As the author, coauthor, or editor of over 120 books, could you tell us how you go about choosing your subjects? 

 

The vast majority come up in a conversation like this, actually. A publisher or someone at a conference will say, is there a book on such or such a topic? And you end up writing one. The big encyclopedias were written precisely because somebody said, have you come across a book in which language is presented with pictures? And once you start thinking about it, it’s a sexy idea, and that’s how the encyclopedia came about. The reason why they are so many things like this waiting to be written is because language is always changing. Whatever English and French were like yesterday, they are different today and they will be different tomorrow. There is always a demand to keep pace.

Very daunting, though, to take a subject like English grammar, as you did in "Making Sense : The Glamorous Story of English Grammar", which I reviewed on this blog,  and write about it. You must be very focused, or very organized, or have a huge team of researchers helping you.

 

Oh no, I never use researchers or assistants. I’m not a good collaborator. I used to, years and years and years ago, but it proved increasingly difficult simply because people’s timetables don’t match easily. Sometimes it’s much quicker just to sit down and write rather than do it jointly.

Like many linguists, I collect things—a usage, a spelling, a punctuation, anything. You keep notes all the times. I always have a drawer full of stuff … Internet headlines, newspaper headlines, articles, blog posts… You try and write something that hasn’t been done before. In the grammar book case, as you noticed, the distinctiveness is bringing together the language acquisition dimension to grammar, as well the descriptive side (what is grammar like?) and the explanatory side (how did the study of grammar develop?). That was the concept: bring together those three domains, which are normally kept separate.

And it made the book all the harder to write because you’re addressing several audiences, really.

 

 

Yes, and then it becomes an interesting literary exercise: how to present the material in such a way that you can keep these different interests separate and yet make the whole topic accessible. Every book, I think, has got to have a literary dimension to it. That’s the difference between being just a scholar and being a writer and a scholar.

  

 What in your opinion is the border between acceptable use of language and unacceptable use of language?

 

 

That’s what linguistics is: it tries to define that borderline between acceptability and unacceptability.

There are cases where something is completely unacceptable. Nobody in the English-speaking world puts the definite article after the noun and says “cat the,” whereas in a language like Romanian that is perfectly acceptable. Then there are cases—never very many, only about two or three percent of usage—where you have a debate over whether something is acceptable. Linguists spend a fair amount of time presenting and discussing these fuzzy cases.

Where the prescriptivists [1] go horribly wrong is that they think the only issues worth talking about are these fuzzy issues. There are far more important issues in relation to grammar, or for that matter pronunciation.

What would you say to a translator about controversial grammatical usage? Should somebody translating French into English use the singular “their” or “they”? Do they start using this at a different point from writers?

The reason why this is an issue is because usage has begun to change. It’s tricky to decide at which point that usage is not going to raise hackles anymore. When I’m writing scripts for the radio, for instance, I make sure not to put in anything that can raise the hackles of slightly older listeners. For instance, I avoid split infinitives. Not because I think they are wrong, but simply because I don’t want to get piles of letters from people saying, “Oh, you used a split infinitive!” and forgetting what I was talking about. The thing about “they” is that we’re in the middle of a process of acceptance, but only about thirty percent into it.

I have said on Twitter that translators should be late adopters of grammatical change.

 

 

That’s very wise. One should be conservative in these matters. Those who are avant-garde will find you slightly old-fashioned, but they’re not going to complain, whereas older people may be upset. I think the point about “they” and “their” is that the same thing happened to English in the Middle Ages with the second person pronoun. Like French, where there was “tu” and “vous,” and “vous” was plural but gradually came to be used as a singular pronoun of respect, English had “thou” and “you,” and “you” began to be used for the singular. In Shakespeare for instance, whenever anybody switches from thou to you, it’s exactly the same as when somebody switches between vous and tu in French. At the time of the change, probably, people worried about it, but nobody would anymore. One day “they” for singular and “they” for plural will be just as normal as “you” for singular and “you” for plural.

Do you have the impression that English is changing faster than before?

 

 

Speed of change is difficult to monitor because the records of the past are not as clear as they might be, and change doesn’t happen in a steady, continuous movement. It has peaks and troughs. But we are now beginning to get a handle on change thanks to the arrival of very big corpora of usage, some of which are now historical in origin. For certain types of grammatical constructions, there is a suggestion of a speeding-up. For example, the use of the present continuous, rather than the present simple, “I’m going” versus “I go.” These days you can say quite happily, “I’m having a meeting next week,” whereas thirty years ago it would have been “I have a meeting next week.” Of course the classic case is the McDonald’s slogan “I’m loving it,” which thirty years ago would have been “I love it.”

Are you familiar with Quebec’s language laws?

 

 

 

Yes I am indeed.

 

 

 

What do you think about trying to redress the power balance between two languages the way this law seeks to do?

 
We’re talking identity now, not intelligibility. When you go around the language world, you’ll find lots of parallel examples. There are two forces driving language: the need for intelligibility and the need for identity. And they can be in conflict. The more a country becomes culturally heterogeneous, the more the language and its dialects become absolutely center stage. It’s very naïve of a country not to grasp this nettle, recognize it, have a minister for languages, or something of that kind. We don’t have one in Britain, and the problems are becoming increasingly noticeable as we become more multicultural.

So language laws are not good or bad, they just exist?

 

 

That’s exactly right. It’s very difficult to extrapolate from one country to another, because situations are so different.

 

 

I have noticed what seems to me an adolescent accent in Quebec French. Do you know of any such cases?

 

 

Adolescent speech is a somewhat neglected area of language acquisition studies. Adolescence is an age when kids are struggling to establish their identity in relation to their peer group and where their accent is therefore going to modulate, quite noticeably and quite fast sometimes, in relation to what they perceive to be the norms of the peer group and what’s desirable and undesirable. This has been clearly noticed in East London, for instance, where adolescents are meeting up and mixing with large numbers of immigrants, and adopting the rhythm of their accents. And at an older level, it might die away a bit, but at adolescent age it’s there.

I have heard you mention how English speakers tend to be monolingual, but that the default around the world is to be multilingual. Do you think this has impoverished the culture of English-speaking people?

 

In a way, although impoverishment is only relevant if lack of ability impinges on your well-being or quality of life. When English speakers travel, they don’t feel impoverished—everybody speaks English, don’t they? So why should they learn another language? And conversely, we don’t have many immigrants in Britain who haven’t learned English. So what’s the point?

But things are changing. The demand for foreign languages is increasing. And after Brexit, it’s probably going to be even greater. So increasingly I hear people saying things like, “I wish I knew more languages.”

 

I was not thinking about material impoverishment, but more the failure to benefit from the cognitive aspects of speaking several languages.

 

When people start saying they should learn a foreign language, they will be motivated initially about earning extra money or having a better quality of life. Eventually issues of identity will arise, and issues of cognitive growth will arise, but they tend to be later rather than earlier in my experience.

We’ve noticed in worldwide surveys with the arrival of Trump that that the reputation and aura of the United States have taken a hit. Do you think this could have an impact on the prestige of the English language?

 

Not anymore. Once upon a time maybe, when the total number of speakers in the world was relatively low and the proportion in America was relatively high. But things have changed. There are now 2.3 billion speakers of English in the world, some 230 million of them in the United States. There are more in India, and will probably soon be more in China. Numbers count in the study of language. Yes, America may have lost some of its shine, but look what’s happening in other parts of the world.

The other point I would make here is that Trump, from a language point of view—nothing to do with politics—has been rather unfairly pilloried for the nature of his oratory. People compare him with Obama and others and say, Trump isn’t an orator. But Trump has a political speaking style that is closer to everyday conversation than any previous politician has ever dared to do. And the result has been to win him votes. So although America might lose out in terms of what he’s saying, I don’t think English is going to lose out in terms of the way he is saying it.

Do you have an opinion about “Globish,” or simplified English for non-native speakers?

 

 

There have always been attempts to simplify English, and Globish is one. But simplification really has gone too far. Imagine a business meeting which tried to restrict itself to a Globish vocabulary. You wouldn’t get very far.

 

English speakers wouldn’t know which words to use and which words to avoid.

 

 

There is an interesting point here: people tend to underestimate the size of their vocabulary. Try having a French speaker who says he has a poor command of English go through a selection of pages from a dictionary and tick the words he knows, then add them up and multiply by the number of pages in the dictionary. You'll be amazed at the total. He could actually know 10,000 words. People know more English than they think.

 

I am interested to hear what you think is the future of Welsh.

 

 

Welsh is the success story of the twentieth century as far as minority and endangered languages are concerned. There was a hugely effective activist movement in the 1960s and 70s. It generated a Welsh television channel, and two Welsh language acts, which helped to protect the language and give it a public presence in a way that it didn’t have before. So there has been a steady increase in the knowledge and use of Welsh. Certainly around here where I live, sixty percent of the population can speak Welsh.

 

Is that success in your view?

 

 

 

Yes, absolutely, compared with a few decades ago.

 

 

 

What is the role of Welsh in daily life? Is it the language that people speak at work?

 

In some domains. You cannot get a job with the local government authority, for example, unless you either speak Welsh or are prepared to learn it. In private business, of course, it’s still optional. And so you will hear it quite routinely spoken, though not enough to satisfy the real keen supporters.

Do you have any advice for someone seeking to learn English?

 

 

The more one can encounter the language in its various forms—online, in mobile form, and so on—the better. The future of a language and the future of a society which finds that language important are in the hands of the younger generation. So I think the more one can use the Internet and all its facilities, the better really.

 

 

[*] Professor Crystal, in addition to being a prolific and prodigious author of books on the English language,  is also extremely active as a  lecturer and broadcaster. He was born in Ireland, grew up in Wales and pursued his academic studies in England. He joined academic life as a lecturer in linguistics, first at Bangor, Wales and then at Reading, England. He has become known chiefly for his research work in English language studies, in such fields as intonation and stylistics, and in the application of linguistics to religious, educational and clinical contexts, notably in the development of a range of linguistic profiling techniques for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Many of his books target a wider audience of lay people.Crystal is Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor.

In addition to the books written in his own name,  he is well known for his two encyclopedias for Cambridge University Press, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Recent books (in addition to Making Sense: the Glamorous Story of English Grammar (2017), reviewed here) include The Story of Be: a Verb's–eye View of the English Language (2017),  The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation (2016), The Oxford Illustrated Shakespeare Dictionary (2015, with Ben Crystal), The Disappearing Dictionary: a treasury of lost English dialect words (2015), and Making a Point: the Pernickety Story of English Punctuation (2015).  Other co-authored books include Words on Words (2000, a dictionary of language quotations compiled with his wife and business-partner, Hilary), Wordsmiths and Warriors: the English-Language Tourist's Guide to Britain (2013, with Hilary), and Shakespeare’s Words (2002) and The Shakespeare Miscellany (2005), the last two in collaboration with his son Ben. 

————————————————— 

[1] Prescriptivism – Oxford Dictionaries: "(Linguistics) Attempting to impose rules of correct usage on the users of a language, e.g.‘a prescriptive grammar book’. Often contrasted with descriptive.

 

    

 

 

 

We welcome our “Linguist of the Month”, Andrew Leigh, a British translator specializing in legal and commercial translations from Spanish and from French into English. Andrew owns Allegro Legal Translations, based in Sheffield, south Yorkshire. Our faithful correspondent, Cynthia Hazelton, like Andrew, holds a law degree and works as a professional legal translator. Cindy also teaches French-English legal translation at Kent State University. The interview was conducted between Cleveland, Ohio, USA and Sheffield, England.

Andrew Leigh, LL.B.	Cynthia Hazelton, D. Jur.
Sheffield (population 550,000)	Cleveland (population 400,000)

Cynthia Hazelton : Please tell our readers the trajectory of your career as a translator.

Andrew Leigh : I suppose I took a typical path to a translation career.  I was good at languages in secondary school and took my first degree in languages at the University of Salford.  I continued my education at the University of Westminster in London where I earned an M.A. in Translation in 1999. Immediately after graduation, I found a job as an in-house translator at an agency in London.  I worked there for three years.  It was a wonderful way to get started in translation.  I worked on all types of translations, and my senior colleagues edited my work. I learned by actually doing translations in a very supportive atmosphere.  At that time, I wasn’t specializing in any one field.  I did medical, technical, accounting and business translations.  I decided that it would be best to specialize in one field, and I enjoyed the law very much.  That’s when I started to take more legal work.

In 2003 I moved to Sheffield and set myself up as a freelance legal translator.  I soon realized that to be a good legal translator, I needed some background in law.  I translated during the day and went to law school at night for 5 years.  We had two children during this time, so my life was very busy.

When I received my law degree, I established my business as Allegro Legal Translations.

I work for private individuals, corporations, law firms and translation agencies.  I enjoy working for different types of clients.

C.H.: Because you specialize in legal translations (from French to English and from Spanish to English), this puts you in the field of “jurilinguistics."  This means that you have to bridge two languages and two legal systems at the same time. You have to convey in the target text, for example, a concept in French law which may be foreign to your British or American client. How do you prepare yourself to translate between the Civil and Common Law systems?

A.L.: Well, this is what I do every day.  This is where having a law degree comes into play.  Having a solid understanding of both the Civil and Common law systems gives me an appreciation of both systems.  For example, when I have to translate the name of a court, such as the Conseil des Prud’hommes, which has no equivalent in Common Law, I understand how to explain it in English.

C.H.: Can you give us an example of a legal concept that exists in one system but not in the other?

A.L.: The Common Law concept of « trust » doesn’t exist in Civil Law.   And the Civil Law concept of “réserve héreditaire” doesn’t exist in Common Law.   Here you have to ask yourself who is the client.  If this translation is for a private client, I will have to expand on the translation and explain the concept.  If it’s for a lawyer, particularly one who deals with French law, I can leave the term in French or translate it, but without explanation.

C.H.: Much has been written and spoken about Machine Translation. The NY Times and the Economist have recently carried articles about the great progress that Google has made in this field. Have you already felt the effects of MT in your business?

A.L.: No, I haven’t experienced any change in my business.  The volume has not changed and I’m still translating the same kind of documents.  I haven’t been asked to do post-editing of a MT document.

 

C.H.: Do you think human translators will become redundant?

A.L.: The role of human translators will probably change, but I don’t think we will ever become redundant.  There will always be a need for a human translator, somewhere along in the translation process.  As an example, I was translating a document recently and arrived at a word in the source text that made no sense in the context, even though it was a correct word in the source language.  I finally realized that it had been misspelled.  The properly-spelled word made perfect sense.  A machine couldn’t have done that.  It required a human translator to catch the error.

I recently saw a quote about this topic:  “Machine translation will only be a threat to people who translate like machines.“

C.H.: How will Brexit, once it has taken place, affect the tendency of Brits to work and live abroad, and will it have an effect the motivation of the younger generation to study European languages?

A.L.: Translators are generally broad-minded.  A recent survey of British translators showed that around 95% of them favored staying in the EU. I’m sure Brexit will result in a loss of opportunities.  I took part in the Erasmus program, and studied in France and Spain.  Brexit will affect the freedom of movement to live and work in another country.  Translators will have to apply for visas and work permits.   There will be barriers to integration.

In the UK, it’s no longer compulsory to study a foreign language throughout high school.  I’m afraid that Brexit will increase the number of students who never learn another language.

C.H.: Here in the USA, tremendous resources are devoted to providing translating and interpreting services at the local, State and Federal level. For example, the written driving texts are available in some States in a variety of languages.

Do you believe that such a policy serves or harms the immigrants who need to acquire a good command of English in their adopted countries, such as the UK and the USA?

A.L.: In the U.K., many governmental administrative documents are translated into ethnic minority languages, such as Urdu, Pashtun and Arabic, but they are not often translated into the major European languages like French, Spanish, Italian, etc. In Wales, documents like election ballots are printed in both Welsh and English. I believe that all citizens have the right to access public services in a language that they can understand.

Language is just one part of the integration conundrum.  True integration also requires social, cultural, educational and economic equality of opportunity.

C.H.:We live in a world where automation is taking away jobs in many fields. You have done some webinars.  Do you foresee the webinar or the video conference as reducing the staff required by a university to replace conventional lectures or even international conferences?

A.L.: The webinars I’ve given have involved law or the business of translation. Here in the UK, the Institute of Translation and Interpreting runs a very successful online course called  Setting up as a Freelance Translator, which covers 8 modules such as Breaking the No Experience Barrier, Using Social Media, Writing a Business Plan and Invoicing.  My module is Getting Paid on Time.

I have also given webinars for eCPD Webinars. My most recent ones were on the subject of EU law.

Webinars allow people from all over the world to log on and learn new things.  I don’t see webinars replacing universities or international conferences, though.

C.H.: What is your greatest challenge in legal translation?

A.L.: I never know what‘s coming next, what I will be translating from one job to the next.  This makes my job interesting.  To be a good translator, you have to have intellectual curiosity because you’ll be doing a lot of research. Translation requires more than just putting words down on paper.  It requires having a wide breadth of knowledge about the topic.

C.H.: Is there anything else you would like to add?

A.L.: It’s very important to keep working on your core translation skills.  Success in translation comes more from one’s abilities than from having a flashy website or a strong presence on social media. 

———–

[1] Les Traditions Juridiques du Droit Civil et de la Common Law

 EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Dr. Geraldine Brodie – l'interviewer	Dr. David Bellos – l'interviewee
University College London	University of Princeton

 

David Bellos is the Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French and Comparative Literature  and Director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton University. He is the author of Romain Gary: A Tall Story (published by Vintage Digital, 2010), and Georges Perec: A Life in Words (published by David R. Godine, 1993) (Prix Goncourt for biography), amongst other books, and the translator of Chronicle in Stone: A Novel by Ismael Kadare (Arcade Publishing, 2011), amongst other translations.

Geraldine Brodie, our Linguist of the Month of August 2016 and since then a regular contributor to this blog is Senior Lecturer in Translation Theory and Theatre Translation in the Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry, where she convenes the MA in Translation Theory and Practice. *

———————————

Your career has progressed from obtaining an Oxford French degree to becoming Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton. University, one of the leading universities in the USA.  How has your study of French literature and language informed your interest in translation?

 

In my youth I was a scholar of nineteenth-century French literature, with a special interest in Balzac and in the book market of the Romantic era.  Obviously, as a university teacher of French, I taught translation every week, but I never thought of myself as being a translator—which is just as well, since I now realize how specific the discipline of pedagogic translation really is. But one day, a colleague put in my hand a slightly dog-eared paperback copy of Georges Perec’s La Vie : mode d’emploi, saying, he couldn’t finish this, but I would probably like it. And indeed I did! It was a revelation. It struck me as a novel that happened to have been written in French but could just as well have been in English, or any language. I wanted to share it. More than that: I wanted to write it! By a series of adventures and misadventures, I did eventually get the chance to do just that. It was a lucky turn of events. La Vie mode d’emploi is not quite as difficult as it looks (much of it echoes the English tradition of the comic novel), but it is a pretty tough assignment (and a very long one) all the same. I think I learned to translate by translating that work. I learned a huge amount about writing in English, and also about the nature of French. The two languages are very close and have long borrowed from each other, but the task of creating Life: A User’s Manual really showed me how different they are in structural terms. To move a work successfully from one to the other takes quite a bit of thought, and if the end product makes it look easy, that’s because the process was very hard. That’s how my so-called career as a translator began: serendipitously. And I do not really think of it as a career. I have always had a day-job. But because Life: A User’s Manual attracted considerable attention, I was asked to translate more Perec, and then all sorts of other things too. Which I did, and still do, but limiting myself to one book a year, since the job that pays the rent has to take priority, after all.

For each book, I do my best to conform to the current ideology of translation, which requires the translator to find an English “voice” for each foreign author and to submit his or her own writing to that imagined identity and style. In retrospect, however, I realise that I write the way I write and that irrespective of my effort to find the right tone for Simenon or Berr or Fournel or Kadare, there must be stylistic commonalities between all the books I have written under my own name and all those I have written as translations. Perhaps one day some assiduous analyst will be able to nail down what it is that makes a translation by me more like another translation by me than like a translation of the same author by another hand. I can’t see what those features are, because they are natural to me, but I strongly suspect they exist.

What I like about translating is that it gives me a chance to bring things that I like to an audience beyond the academy. Luck also plays a role—in the titles that are brought to my attention, and in the respectful relations I have with a number of publishers who understand my taste. Also, because I do have that day job, I only translate books I like, and I know that is a rare and in a sense quite outrageous privilege to have as a translator. But I also think that because translating demands scholarship, on the one hand, and creativity, on the other, it is one of the most rewarding things that a language specialist can do.

Your publications list is hugely varied, with a large number of translations to your name. How do you see the mix between academic literature, translations and more publications of more general interest among your work?

 

You say my publications are varied, and I find that flattering, because I would like to believe that, like my hero Georges Perec, I never write the same book twice. Well, I would like to believe it, but it is not entirely true. Three of my books belong to the genre of biography (the lives of Perec, Tati, and Gary) calling on many of the same skills and methods, and they are located in the same cultural, geographic and chronological space—all my subjects are more or less un-French creators working in Paris between 1945 and 1982. 

Three of my other books are books about books (Cousine Bette, Père Goriot, and Les Misérables) and similarly exploit the same broad field of expertise and the same general methods of approach. The outlier is Is That a Fish in Your Ear? —but that’s about translation, something I’ve been doing for thirty years, and that I’ve been teaching for even longer than that. If I had the knowledge and the cheek, I’d like to be much more varied than that!

Translation and the Meaning of Everything	Une histoire fabuleuse de la traduction

Is That A Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything was described by Susan Harris in The Quarterly Conversation (5 December 2011) as ‘that marvelous rarity, a book by a specialist that can be enjoyed by general readers’. What inspired you to write this book?

 

I never intended to write a book about translation. In 2007 I was asked to become the director of a new undergraduate program at Princeton that aimed to educate our students about the nature and stakes of translation (not to train translators—Princeton doesn’t do vocational training of any kind). So I devised a new course that introduced some of the philosophical, linguistic, historical and social issues related to the phenomenon of translation. It was a whole new education for me! In the course of devising and teaching the course I became increasingly irritated by the numerous inherited clichés that many others have railed against before me, and I began to write a few little squibs about the silly things people carry on saying (“translation is no substitute for the original”, les belles infidèles, traduttore traditore, and so on). My son, who is a much more celebrated writer than I am, took a look and told me to carry on. So I did. Especially because on the first day of a semester of study leave I slipped on a patch of ice and broke my ankle, so I had three months stuck indoors in a plaster cast. What else could I do but write a book? I had no idea who might publish such a set of essays, so I contacted a literary agent, and she too urged me to carry on and to turn it into a book, subject to various adjustments she thought necessary. In due course, she found a publisher for me, and my editor at Penguin (and then the American editor at FSG) made all kinds of smart suggestions for re-ordering the material and bringing the work to completion. So although the book is undoubtedly mine, it is also the product of my students, my agent and my brilliant editors. I really enjoyed the back and forth, and the discovery of what the book really had to say through argument and discussion. I know a lot of people grumble about publishers and agents and editors but I must say I have found wisdom and support in those quarters. They are not writers, but they do know what writing is.

 

As a translation expert, what are your thoughts on the translations of Is That A Fish in Your Ear? into various languages. Were you involved in the translation process?

 

Since I argue very strongly that everything can be translated—I have an almost allergic reaction to people who declare things to be untranslatable, even when translating books absurdly entitled “Dictionary of Untranslatables”—I was overjoyed when foreign publishers bought the rights to Is That A Fish in Your Ear?  It’s a book that can only be proved right by its own translation! Flammarion put me in touch with Daniel Loayza, who turned out to be the most perfect French translator imaginable. He’s a learned classicist with long experience in translating for the theatre and a tremendous sense of fun. He translated, I commented, and together we found solutions to the thorniest problems I had created, in correspondence but also in brainstorming sessions in Paris and in Princeton. The title was altered to Le Poisson et le bananier , because the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which inspired the English title, (Is That a Fish in Your Ear?….) is not very well known in France. [1] (It is not a problem in German, since Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is well known there—in fact, the German title is a direct quotation.) So for France we replaced it with an internal reference to the first translation of the Gospel of Matthew into Malay, where the parable of the fig tree is transformed into a banana in what is perhaps the earliest example of cultural substitution as a translation technique. The word fish remains in Le Poisson et le bananier, but supported by two additional pages explaining the story of the Babel Fish, with a picture to show it too.  The French translation appeared just a few weeks after the English original, so it was available to the Spanish translator as a model of adaptation; he borrowed some of Daniel Loayza’s ideas but also added informational paragraphs about the specific history of Bible translation in Spain, which is different from the English story. The German translation changes, adds and subtracts very little, partly because German is (perhaps surprisingly) quite close to English in translation culture. As for the Asian translations, I’m afraid I don’t have the equipment to get involved. I just look at the Korean on my bookshelf and admire.

What is your next project going to be?

 

 

 

 My next project? I’ll tell you when it’s done! This semester I am teaching a new course on the history and culture of copyright (COM 332, Who Owns This Sentence?), in partnership with an Intellectual Property lawyer. It’s a complicated subject, also fascinating and great fun—and also, I believe, quite fundamental to the world in which we now live. But I don’t yet know if it will grow into a book very soon, or at all. Am I not allowed to take a break?

 

 

 [1] The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the first of five books in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comedy science fiction "trilogy" by Douglas Adams. The novel is an adaptation of the first four parts of Adams' radio series of the same name. The novel was first published in London on 12 October 1979.

 

* Geraldine devised and co-convened the Translation in History Lecture Series and the Theatre Translation Forum, and was a co-editor of the online journal New Voices in Translation Studies from 2012 to 2015.

Geraldine's research focuses on theatre translation practices in contemporary London, including the collaborative role of the translator in performance and the intermediality and interlinearity of surtitles.She is a frequent presenter on these topics, in the UK and internationally, and her work has been published in a variety of publications. Geraldine is a member of the Panel of Associates of ARTIS, a new research training initiative in the broad area of translation and interpreting studies.

Geraldine has an MA in Comparative Literature from University College London and read English as an undergraduate at Brasenose College, Oxford where she specialised in Linguistics, Old and Middle English and Old French. She has a Diploma de Español como Lengua Extranjera from the Instituto Cervantes. Geraldine's research interests include the multiple voices of translation; direct, indirect and literal theatre translation; adaptation and version; the intermediality of surtitles; and ethics in translation. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and a member of the Chartered Institute of Taxation. Geraldine's first monograph, The Translator on Stage, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2017.

 

Additional reading:

The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables

 

 

 

 

Anglais de pacotille	Manship, suffixe anglais à tout faire
14/10/2018	22/07/2017
Veni, vidi, vici : les dictionnaires visuels	Le 23 octobre – le 200ème anniversaire de Pierre Larousse
18/05/2017	21/10/2017
Créancier de l'anglais, le français s'est payé en nature	La grande aventure du mot « peradventure » racontée par lui-même
09/10/2016	14/04/2016
Cent un ans de gestation pour un dictionnaire
01/09/2014

INTERVIEW

 

Poet Pascale Petit, our interviewee,  was born to a Welsh mother and French father and grew up between Paris and Wales. Four of her seven poetry collections were nominated for the T.S. Eliot Award. Poems from Fauverie won the Manchester Poetry Prize and she was also granted a Cholmondeley Award. Pascale has been the judge for many major prizes and her work has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, French and Serbian. Pascale lives in Cornwall but travels regularly to France. Her website is www.pascalepetit.co.uk

 

 ————

Our interviewer, poet and critic Alice Hiller holds a Ph.D. from University College London in transatlantic writing. She has been mentored by Pascale Petit under the Jerwood Arvon scheme. Author of The T-Shirt Book, she reviews for the Times Literary Supplement  and Poetry Review and was shortlisted for the 2017 Bridport Prize. Alice divides her time principally between London and Oxford. 

 

In the interview that follows, Alice speaks to Pascale about growing up between two languages, why she writes in English about France and the Amazon, and her most recent collection, Mama Amazonica, published by Bloodaxe in 2017.

 

  

Alice. Can you tell me about your links to France? You were born in Paris and you hold a French passport?

 

Pascale. I am about to become a British citizen because of Brexit, but all my life I've been a French citizen. I was born in Paris in 1953, then sent to live with my grandmother in Wales. From two and a half to seven I lived in Paris so I spent my early childhood mainly there. As an adult I never went back to Paris until my father made contact because he was dying. I went to see him in the Latin Quarter. Over the two years that I visited him I grew to know Paris, having hated it as a child. After my father died, and I started going to Paris on my own for writing retreats, I really fell in love with the city, the Latin Quarter, the museums, Notre-Dame.

Alice. You spoke French as well as English growing up?

 

Pascale. I'm not really sure which was my mother tongue. I think that what happened was that I would forget one. As a child you learn a language so fast. When I was going to be sent to my grandmother in Wales aged seven, I didn't know any English. Just before we went, my father and mother were trying to teach us a few words. When we arrived and sat on my grandmother's settee, my poor aunt, who was sixteen, was trying to speak French with us. We constantly forgot a language, my brother and myself, and then learnt it again.

 

Alice. I've noticed that while you always write in English, your poems are often set in the landscapes of South America and France. Does your imagination go there instinctively?

Pascale:  Yes. I lived in London almost all my adult life, and I haven't written a single poem about London that I would put in a collection. I love Paris as a city. I don't love London. It was a great place to live when I was young – if you're trying to become a poet or a sculptor, as I was. I love London's multiculturalism, though.

 

Alice. In The Zoo Father, which was your breakthrough collection from 2001, in addition to your Amazonian poems about re-meeting your father in Paris, there were also poems about the Midi. Is that area important to you?

Pascale: The Languedoc, and the causses in particular, and the dry stone walls, were my first Amazon.

 

 

 

Alice. I also spent time in the Causse (causses) as a child. There is something about the solitariness of the landscape and the light that is extraordinary.

Pascale: My mother bought a vineyard when I was twelve, where we camped in stone huts. It was on a steep slope, so mountainous, just under the Larzac and the Grézac plateau. It was overgrown, very lush, and when we would arrive at the beginning of the summer holiday we'd have to get the scythe out, and cut a path between the two mazets. One was the sleeping mazet and one was the kitchen, at the top, right in the sous-bois. You would walk along the path and these snakes would move in front of you. Then there'd be the lizards and the huge insects. I've been back many times since then. It's now no longer a vineyard, just a patch of wild land, but the insects never seem so big as when I was twelve. Then they seemed absolutely enormous.

Alice: I think there's a sort of hyper-realism about how you see things as a teenager. In The Huntress, the collection which followed in 2005, you explore your Welsh mother in terms of the cave systems of the Languedoc, and you write about excavating painful memories through the medium of beautiful crystals.

Pascale: I was haunted by my mother. I loved looking at the Grotte des Demoiselles – the suggested shapes of the stalactites and stalagmites – and the formations of the crystals in the ceiling. I can't help thinking about the inside of a mountain in terms of the inside of my mother. I was living with my grandmother in rural mid-Wales when my mother bought the vineyard. I remember the summer holidays there as being rather exciting and fun, and her being ok. Although she had suffered from mental illness as a child, it was only when I went to live with her when I was thirteen that she became quite mad. The Larzac was also an Eden – where I was scared of her, but not terrified. My next book will return to that area.

Alice: The French language can also be a site of memory for you? I'm thinking of 'The Dragonfly Daughter' when you wrote "I know her by her French name, libellule".

Pascale: That's from being in the vineyard with my mother. She spoke French absolutely perfectly. She was completely bilingual. She would have told me what it was called in French. She used to try to keep our French up. We used to have to speak French at meals in Wales. When I went to live with her in Wales at thirteen she would have called things by both their French and English names. The memory is locked in the French word.

 

Alice: There's a terrifying poem in your collection The Huntress called 'Lunettes' where you describe seeing your father's "lunettes" when he came into your girlhood bedroom in Paris. The word unlocks a Pandora's chest of memory. You realize the poem – about the rape of a child – through the progressive dictionary definitions of its meaning.

Pascale: It's almost totally a found poem. Obviously I moved it around and adjusted it.

 

 

Alice: Responding to a more positive element within your French heritage, as someone who originally trained and exhibited as a sculptor, was the Midi a key part in awakening your visual sensibility?
I'm thinking of the poem 'My Larzac Childhood' in The Treekeeper's Tale of 2008, when you remember the "grass-snake-flashing paths" and the "museum of the dragonfly's abdomen". You describe the dragonfly wings as if the light is coming in through museum skylights.

Pascale: I have a thing about glass. I think it was because I was placed in an incubator when I was a baby. I think of my mother in terms of a glass mother because she was very brittle and otherworldly. She was strange to us. I think that brought this obsession with glass to my looking at the glass wings of the dragonfly. I became a visual artist through drawing. It happened when I was deeply unhappy at home in Paris and I would be left in school in the evenings. It was a horrible school. I don't think I was any good at school because of the language. I would draw, and I found I could escape. I had a total facility. I drew submarines in the ocean. It was a way to make an alternative world for myself. Later in Wales I became very good at school, and there was a lot of pressure for me to go to university, but I chose to go to Art School.

 

Alice:  Art can be a place where we are able to realize ourselves if we come from backgrounds which don't allow us to say who we are. We become ourselves in the art that we make and then take that self forward.

Pascale: As a child I was deeply withdrawn. In my art I wasn't withdrawn. I was an extrovert in my art.

 

 

Alice:  Your poems are not shy poems.

 

Pascale: People are often surprised when they meet me because I am so shy and quiet and my poems aren't.

 

 

Alice: In Fauverie, your last but one collection, you engage with Paris in much more detail. This comes from the time you spent reclaiming the city?

Pascale: I began discovering Paris like a tourist. I fell in love with Notre- Dame. I spent every day going in there. There were also the sparrows outside I could hand-feed. That was such a wonderful draw.

Alice: You had a living, nurturing transaction in the city.

Pascale:  I rented short-term lets in the Latin Quarter as close to the Jardin des Plantes as possible. Usually facing the gate. I would walk in the gardens every day. And discover new things about Paris each time. It was wonderful.

 
Alice: The Fauverie poems are very powerful. Having a creative engagement with a place where you have suffered, and making good work, even if is complex or has difficult themes, gives the work deep roots.

Pascale: I did those very pleasurable things, but also went back to the Boulevard de Grenelle, in the 15th arrondissement, where we lived. My father had given me the address. I went there and twice I was let into the cellar where I was locked as a child. I'd had so many dreams about it when I was a child and then a teenager. I made an installation when I was on my BA course – of being in that cellar. In my memory the main feature of this cellar was a window. Afterwards I told myself I must have imagined this because cellars don't have windows. I went into this cellar, and there was a window. It was at the top of the stairs, looking over the courtyard, very high. It was one of those small courtyards which I remember so well as a child. There was the cellar then you went down the steps and there was the earthen floor. It was the most terrifying cellar I've ever seen. The first time I told the concierge why I was coming. He let me in and the light went off and it was terrifying. Every detail comes from that visit.

 

Alice: In Mama Amazonica, your current collection, which was published by Bloodaxe in September 2017, there is a poem 'Square de la Place Dupleix', which takes the reader to the Paris square of chestnut trees and pigeon gods, and then lets them fall back into the "coffining dark" of your childhood.

Pascale: That poem should have been in Fauverie. Although Mama Amazonica is about the abuse and rape of my mother by my father, at the kernel of it is a sequence of poems about how that trauma also permeated to his children. I really wanted to write about finding this park. I tried on several occasions but I could not find it. Nothing matched my memory. Then I went behind our block and there it was. It was incredible. There was the church. There was the school with the infant school next to it. I had to find my own way to school and back and I always got lost even though it was very close. I remember my mother telling me off, saying "It's just around the corner." I have no sense of left and right. I just went in the wrong direction. I would play in the sand in the square, which I also see as a precursor to being a sculptor, and then the gendarme, who was in his little hut, would put me on a stool, and phone my mother, and say "She's here."

Alice: In Mama Amazonica, although many of the poems are based on two recent trips you made to the Amazon, and have vivid descriptions of being in the Amazon and the creatures you saw there, there are also more poems about Paris. I was interested in 'Bestiarum' which takes as its starting point Walton Ford's 'Bête du Gévaudan' at the Musée de la Chasse et Nature. It seems to be informed by the French idea of the loup-garou.

Pascale:  The legend is from the Lozère, just above the Languedoc. I discovered the Musée de la Chasse quite late. They have contemporary artists among the permanent displays. It is such a beautifully curated museum. I loved Walton Ford's paintings. There are two poems in Mama Amazonica based on his work. 'When My Mother Became A Boa' comes directly from one of his paintings.

Alice: The Seine and the Amazon are flowing in and out of each other?

Pascale: In the Musée there are stuffed wolverines, for example. There are lions. They do things in Paris not allowed in the UK. Quite a lot of stuffed animals in shops. The French imagination is much more open to the Amazon. In England, if you write poems about India or Africa, places where there have been colonies, there is more empathy, whereas South America is too removed. Before the day of researching online, I found that Paris had all the ethnographic books I could not get in the UK.

Alice: The jaguar is a central beast in Fauverie and Mama Amazonica, but your close encounters with jaguars came in Paris initially?

Pascale: When I used to visit my father, at the end of his life, he was living just by the zoo in the Jardin des Plantes. There was a black jaguar, and a gold female jaguar. They were in very small cages at that point.

 

 

Alice: You finally saw a jaguar in the wild from a boat on the Amazon, leading to the extraordinary, healing poem, 'The Jaguar' which closes Mama Amazonica.

Pascale: The experience was one of the highlights of my life. I absolutely worship them. I have read everything you could possibly read about the jaguar. When I stayed in Paris I would go to see Aramis the jaguar and Simara, his young girlfriend, every day, not long before closing time. They would feed them, then he would spring into action.

Alice: One of the pleasures of Mama Amazonica is that you translate the experience of the Amazon into words that make a 5D environment for the reader. Do you think the fact that your mind has had to move through different languages has helped you in the way that you are able to realize yourself as a poet?

Pascale: Thank you for saying that. I do aim to do that. I had never thought of it being to do with the fact that I had to move from language to language when I was a child. I always thought that it was because I was an artist, and I still need to make sculptures in my books, and installations, and environments that people walk into. I need to make them very physical and very real. That is always a tussle with language. Language has to be strong enough to reconstruct the images and sounds and sensory details to surround the reader.

Alice: Finally, I know you're deeply engaged in judging. You've just judged the Manchester Poetry Prize. You're judging the National Poetry Competition. But what lies beyond this in 2018 in terms of plans for your own works?

Pascale: I have a project on the go. I think all that I would say is that one of the main themes is foreign-ness. It partly comes out of Brexit. It's partly because I had to get British nationality. It partly comes out of my Welsh grandmother, who brought me up. She was born in India. She was half Indian but it was a family secret. It's hard to get any facts at all about this because it's very covered up. But those are my plans for this year.

Alice: And I gather there will be a French translation of Fauverie in 2018?

Pascale: Yes Valérie Rouzeau, an absolutely wonderful poet, the ideal translator, has translated Fauverie and it will soon be sent out to the publisher.

 

Contributions precedentes de René Meertens :

Anglais de pacotille 14/10/2018	Manship, suffixe anglais à tout faire 22/07/2017
Veni, vidi, vici : les dictionnaires visuels 18/05/2017	Le 23 octobre – le 200ème anniversaire de Pierre Larousse 21/10/2017
Créancier de l’anglais, le français s’est payé en nature 9/10/2016	La grande aventure du mot « peradventure » racontée par lui-même 14/04/2016
Cent un ans de gestation pour un dictionnaire 01/09/2014	Critique de livre lexicographique 19/12/2011