New year, new classes, same old problem

So the summer holidays are a dim and distant memory, the new school year has started and I've got to know several new classes. Today I collected their first written homework. It appears that this bunch are no better at using the dictionary than last year's..... The very first paper I picked up has the following superb example of both how not to use the dictionary and the need to be able to spell in one's own language:
"She burned herself while she leathered her chips."

to cook: cuire
leather: cuir

Pupils

One last post before the summer holidays: I'll be back in September when I'm sure my pupils will continue to provide us with plenty of entertainement.
From the paragraph of translation just before the previous example.
The original English: "When he opens his eyes, I look into them. They are glassy. Even in the shadow of the station his pupils are pinpricks."
One examinee managed to translate "They are glassy" as "Il avait des lunettes": He had glasses (oops).
Two, however, failed to take into account the context - we are talking about eyes and "pupil" sounds the same as the French word pupille even if there's a slight difference in spelling. I suspect in the second example the candidate also read "glassy" as "class" .....

"Derrière les fenêtres de la gare ses élèves sont malades"
Behind the station windows his pupils are ill.

and

"Dans les étages de sa classe ces [sic] élèves sont brillants" :
In the floors of his class(room) these pupils are brilliant.

Well these pupils definitely aren't!  I suppose it keeps me in work......

Rule One: A translation must make sense

Alas, many pupils and students neglect the basic principle that if their translation doesn't make sense in French (their native language) than the chances are that they've made a mistake... at their level we don't give them Ulysses or Bardolino to translate.
My colleague Mel is also marking exam scripts this week and she thought we might like to share the following.
The candidates had to translate a short paragraph of dialogue from English to French. Part of the English read
"I was told you were dead"

Pupils' translations: Je t'avais dit que j'étais mort: "I told you I was dead",
Je t'avais dit que tu étais morte: "I told you you were dead"
Je voulais te parler quand je suis mort:."I wanted to talk to you when I was dead"

All in a good cause

Earlier in the week I was prevailed upon to buy a programme for a charity event run by a British club here in France. The programme is "bilingual" and is generally comprehensible despite several inaccuracies in the French, but it was when I came to the item "Croquis à thème britanniques" that I let out a howl and demanded to know who was responsible for the translation. "The computer" I was told... well yes, obviously... the poor machine doesn't know the difference between the kind of sketch which is a drawing and the sketch which is a short scene.... and just as Murphy's Law dictates that your bread will always fall buttered-side down, there must be a linguistic equivalent which dictates that a machine will always pick the wrong translation where  two or more are possible.

I may not be able to update the blog in the coming week... I'm marking exam papers. For this exam the pupils do not have acces to a dictionary, so there probably won't be to much material for me to share with you.... but I'll make a note of any gems.

Making a monkey out of the tour guide

Some years ago I was part of a group of tourists on a coach tour of Rome. The specialist "city guide" had been told it was a German group with a few English speakers. Unfortunately for her, it was precisely the opposite and she was left struggling in a language in which she didn't feel at ease. So we toured St Peter's and on several occasions she referred to the "apes" on carvings or bronzes which she told us  were the symbol of the Medici family. Well I looked long and hard, but I really couldn't see anything remotely resembling an ape. What  did notice, after a while, was a large number of bees.....
Not quite the same symbol.

caught napping

The ability of certain students to put their faith in a machine translation, even when it flies in the face of all reason, never fails to amaze me.
This example is from a paper written by a lad who had been studying English at school for at least six years:

"We nap"

It made no sense in the context in which he'd written it, so I had to work backwards. "a nap" - a short sleep -  can be translated into French as "un somme"  (not to be confused with une somme: a sum of money, for example).

Nous sommes : we are, but the student obviously typed "nous somme" and that is precisely what the software translated : garbage in, garbage out.

Out of office reply

You may have seen this before, but having started on the theme of "what happens when you trust a machine" I remembered reading this in the Daily Telegraph a couple of years ago.
Since the mid 1960s roadsigns in Wales have been in both English and Welsh. In this case the text was sent by e-mail  in English to the in-house translation team for Swansea Council. What came back in Welsh was printed on the sign. However, it actually means
 "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated."
 


Funny, but not life-threatening......  unlike the bilingual pedestrian sign spotted in Cardiff in 2006 which told pedestrians to "look right" in English, and "edrychwch i'r chwith" ("look left") in Welsh.