In our monthly French language column, intrepid Douglas Campbell scours the media and tracks down Men Behaving Badly in the shape of the Rolling Stones, Jean-Luc Delarue and someone who doesn't want to be called Mr. Getty.

Heavy tributes

Heavy tributes? Is this some sixties-style way of showing hommage or reverence? No, it's gallicism time. First, to give you the context, standard-issue journalistic use of the expression 'payer un lourd tribut'. In an article about a documentary on the life of the Rolling Stones on the road, and the dreadful toll taken by drugs and the the rock'n'roll lifestyle, we find the following: 'Ce sont plutôt les accompagnateurs, les aides de camp, les courtisans de toute sorte qui, à force de tuer le temps comme ils peuvent, payent à vue d'oeil le plus cher tribut à la saga stonienne.' You will also see it every single week in L'Équipe: whenever a team or player 'pays a high price' for an error, or 'makes a costly defensive mistake', you will read something like 'l'équipe a payé un lourd tribut'. It was a recent emotional outburst from Arsène Wenger which reminded me of a post-match interview last year, in which he clearly baffled the interviewer by saying that Arsenal had 'paid a heavy tribute' when they lost a match.
 

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Actualités people

Celeb news time! Nothing to do with 'people' this time - see several recent columns - but when even Le Monde, admittedly on its 'page trois', covers celebrity air-rage, it's time to mention it. Jean-Luc Delarue, a high-profile France 2 presenter, misbehaved spectacularly, and not for the first time, on a recent flight. In the coverage in Le Monde and elsewhere you see terms such as 'incidents de passagers perturbateurs', 'incident violent lors d'un vol' and so on. Whereas 'road rage' is commonly translated by 'accès de colère au volant' or 'la colère au volant', I have yet to see anything with 'colère' corresponding to 'air rage'. What I have heard and read a few times from Delarue and others is the use of 'péter les plombs' - 'to totally lose it' - in this context, coupled with something to tell you it happened on a plane.

'rage de l'air'

I don't imagine for one moment that 'pétage de plombs aérien/dans un avion/lors d'un vol' is about to become standard for 'air rage', but clearly the French are feeling their way towards something other than a lengthy description of 'incidents où des passagers perturbent le travail de l'équipage' or 'comportements excessifs de passagers', going via anglicisms in the form of blatant calques such as 'rage de l'air'.

Apparently mad translations of tutoiement

In the subtitled version of Godard's Bande à part there is a moment which appears totally crazy at first glance, and frankly not a lot less crazy once you have seen the line and its translation in context. The two would-be gangsters are discussing their relationship with Odile, and there is the following exchange:

'Avec Odile vous vous tutoyez?'
['Kissed Odile yet?']
'Non, pas encore, pourquoi?'
['No, not yet, why?']
'Je me l'enverrai quand ça me dira.'
['I can get her whenever I like.']

Now, even in the context of macho sexual boasting between blokes, and with the boastful follow-up that 'I can get her whenever I like', 'Kissed Odile yet?' is still a fairly outlandish translation of 'Avec Odile vous vous tutoyez?'. You might have expected 'Getting on well with Odile?' or 'How are things going with you and Odile?', the latter being dangerously close to the usual maximum of forty characters per line in a subtitle. The average is around thirty-five, depending on the film and the font size, remembering that the TV channel Arte prefers thirty-two because of the size of 'le petit écran'.

I am reliably informed by a colleague that Weekend in particular is full of appalling subtitling, but I do not think I can bear to watch so much as five minutes of it ever again, so if anyone has noted anything when watching that particular Godard, I would happily pass it on to cyber-readers.

Another example, rather more recent this time, of more or less unsatisfactory solutions to this thorny problem comes up in the Dominik Moll film Lemming (2005). A couple are bickering, and part of her teasing is to address him as 'vous', whereas he continues to call her 'tu'. Here's the exchange where 'Mr', in a standard solution to this problem, covers the 'vouvoiement', but the fact that (a) he persists in using 'tu' and (b) she continues to 'vouvoie' him even after he has objected is absent from the subtitles.

'Vous vous laissez aller, ça ne vous va pas.'
['Getting sloppy, Mr Getty, it doesn't suit you.']
'Arrête de me vouvoyer.'
['Stop calling me Mr Getty.']
'Ça n'avait pas l'air de vous déranger l'autre fois'.
['It didn't seem to bother you last time.']

Why do these things disappear? The demands of subtitles; time on-screen, the number of characters per line, the need to summarise and condense. Something very often has to give, with dialogue of any speed at all, and these are the kinds of touches which vanish. This should perhaps be part of our sales pitch for learning languages: even the finest subtitling will always lose something, even when comparing the subtitles and the dialogue is part of the experience of seeing films 'en v.o.'.

Dougal Campbell, French language tutor at Glasgow University 
 
Please contact the author with any comments and similar amuse-gueule snippets of French, at D.Campbell@french.arts.gla.ac.uk