Montreal’s "Just for Laughs" comedy festival comes but once a year, but misadventures in translation in a bi-lingual society provide comedy all year round. Not being attuned to all the nuances of the French language, I admit that my nascent collection of misspellings and malapropisms found in travels around Quebec is linguistically biased. My ears and eyes are not attuned to various abominations of French as it is spoken, written and translated by non-francophone speakers in the province. But there's the one about the T-shirt made in Turkey. To suit to the Quebec market, the manufacturers affixed this French label: "Fait en Dinde." (Dinde being the word not for the country of Turkey; but for the bird you gobble at Thanksgiving):
Young Partridge sitting over a sofa
The funniest book I've ever read is French Widow in Every Room, a motley collection of signs, menu items, hotel notices, and extracts from tourist brochures from all over the world, in what might be called English, assembled by Dennis Winston (HarperCollins, 1987). Many of the items are so off-the-wall, they make my samplings look tame. How would you like to be served "grilled lamp" or "head lamp," or "geaps of lamp greece?" How about "young partridge over sofa?" Or perhaps "combinated of assaulted greengrocers," "salad with gardener," or "children sandwiches?" Then there's "soup with pancake rags," "bee tongue fried," or "fumigated smocked cheese" and "breast of foul chef.”
House pie is no match for tarte maison
In Quebec the menu translations are somewhat less unappetizing. One menu featured "paw and meat balls stew," (for ragout de pattes et boulettes), "the crudity bunch" (for le bouquet de crudités) - proof of how a French dish can lose its dignity upon translation. The "liver pie Caroline" just ain't the same as la Caroline de mousse de paté foie, and "house pie" isn't a match for tarte maison while the "broccoli with bread crumbs" sounds downright silly. As for table manners, a Breton friend of mine who was offered second helpings at an American celebration of Thanksgiving thought he was being polite when he replied, "No thank you, I am fed up."
Winston's book includes a barber shop notice seen in Bombay: "Hair cutter and clean shaver. Gentlemen's throats cut with very sharp razors with great care and skill. No irritating feeling afterwards." Indeed! Speaking of murder, what do you say to a Frenchman who exclaims "You have a beuoootiful corpse? (corps being the word for body in French):
Tarte Maison or House Pie? - which sounds tastier?
"Then there's that perpetual confusion over gender - and time, temperature and weather. "The grass you must not march on him" warned a park notice in Brussels, and the time zone warning on an Italian cruise ship explained "the hour will be 60 minutes late today." Confusing temps with weather, a French travelling companion who surveyed the sky once told me, "It's too early to tell what time it is."
Quebec guidebooks are full of delightful spellings and coinings: “delated, flee market, hereunder, iland, childreen, phenomenous, soft drings (as in Coca Cola), snaking (as in fine dining and snacking), unfluence, unsular, varioux, whalesalers, and whishes. Then there is the confusion of using a word that sounds like another: "a complete list of ... outfitters and organisms;" the "playground for the young at hearth;" "stands has a reminder." The "common rockwhale" (from rorqual commun), should by all rights have been a finback whale. Like the “sandpaper” which should have been a “sandpiper”, pointed out to me by a naturalist on L'ile aux Lievres. And there are words that have no life outside the translator's dictionary: "two of Charlevoix's ski slopes are officially homologated by the International Ski Federation" (a nifty way of saying “approved.”)
In discussing this tricky task of translation, a contact at the tourism ministry generously offered to help me in my work. "I could be a sounding bag for you," he said.
Finally, some of the best from the Quebec tourism, brochures:
"The Bourlamanque Mining Village tells us a touching slice of the Abitibi's history. The boarding houses accommodated celibate minors."
"Ski without border. Through your migrations you will learn to harmonize with the inherent laws of nature."
"A charming decor and atmosphere protrudes romanticism."
"At Granby Zoo you will see tarantulas and scorpios." (Sagittarians need not apply.)
"This beach reaches out into a lake full of fish."
"Just imagine 300 kilometres of sturdy coastline."
"A jewel in a rocks box, that's how appears Baie-des-Moutons.
Notice that there is a cemetary on a rocky island where, because there is not enough earth, deads are buried in fissures that are then covered by rocks."
"Drummondville, which currently deposit a city of gathering, is the turntable of the region."
"The town of Granby, known for its antiques fountains origination before Christ."
"The festival will feature a fashion show of ancient and now fire trucks."
"Le Bateau Ivre, an ancient tugboat, is a meeting place for those who want a feeling of evasion in the middle of the ocean."
Some day I may finish my Dictionary of experiential French. It reads like an autobiography of my decade in Quebec.
écluse: One of my first research trips for my Short Hops travel column, someone at the Canadian railway museum suggested I visit “les écluses” at Saint Catherine Quebec. I drove off to find them; thinking they were monks in a monastery (the Saint Catherine recluses) and was embarrassed to find they were shipping locks.
baiser: On a white-water rafting trip on the Riviera Batiscan; my river guide was singing a Quebec song with the words baiser ma grande-mère: He explained baiser with a risqué gesture involving his two hands.
péché: I saw this word on a Quebec church door one night and wondered why they were putting fish in hell : the word for fish is pêche, but the wages of péché—SIN— is hell. And the wages of learning a foreign language is getting laughed at.
petite crotte: My Québécoise belle-mère (mother-in-law) used to call me in an affectionate tone. One day after I saw someone shouting at a little dog for pooping on the sidewalk, I looked it up in the Le Robert dictionary: “excrement solide en petites boules”—solid excrement in little balls.
boue: La Société Québécoise de la Speléogie—the Spelunking Society of Quebec— once sent me a press kit containing, a smelly lump of mud marked " blue véritable de la grotto de Saint-Léonard—actual mud from the Saint Leonard Caves. The envelope was decorated with a hand drawn chauve-souris which I knew already was not a bald mouse, but a bat. I had learned that while hanging upside down on a wall in a bilingual Iyengar Yoga class.
