8/2/2019 Learning Translation - Learning English and French

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Translation:experience3

Learning Translation: Learning English and French

I learn English for work and I continue reading French - sometimes watching TV5 Monde -

for pleasure. Truth be told, I used French for my graduate degree but stopped using it since

end 2007. That is the reason I am writing only in English. Now it starts to become very

unusual for me to open my mouth and begin a conversation in French. Though, I am happy

that I am still able to read it properly.

Japanese anime series are very popular these days. The fansubs (subtitling by fans) providequality translation for those who do not speak Japanese to comprehend the series. Iconsider myself lucky enough to watch them in the original audio - Japanese - and read thesubtitles in sometimes English, sometimes French and sometimes both. I often purposelyclick the pause button to be able to spot the language differences and learn them. Thoughthe progress is slow, it surely is a reliable way to acquire the real sense of what thecharacters are saying. It helps learning words that are used in everyday language.

Cambodia used to be basically francophone. That changes over time. Even French workingin the country have to use English for communication in their office. But this phenomenondoes not change the fact that French language still exists here. Lucky enough, a few friendsof mine brilliantly speak both English and French (even better than I do). Though one ofthem used to question me about one thing: when drafting a document, the term theundersigned appear to be problematic. the undersigned as in We, the undersigned, blahblah blah. When I told the person to put the, he responded that in French, there is no articleused, as in Je, [le] sousign, blah blah blah. And he asked: are you sure to put the? Ihave never noticed it until that he threw that very question at me. I thought back andanswered that I am not sure about grammatical rules but that I am sure I used to hear andsee it that way in both languages. That is the way I learn a language after all. I used to be agrammar-focused student and changed myself to more culture-focused and stopped askingthe why questions for grammar. The best analogy that I gave him that time was: I am astudent. In French, I am pretty sure they say: Je suis [un] tudiant. You do not need to askfor explanation from native speakers. The rule is simple: observe, remember and then use itthe way a child does.

I like surfing the internet. Whenever possible, I look for websites that are bilingual. I firstcame across www.linguee.fr which provides suggestions for translation French-English. It isvery resourceful. Another website that I can learn from, if I have boring time to kill, ishttp://www.pm.gc.ca/ . The .ca already tells that it is Canadian. Many articles are wellwritten in both English and French.

What I am trying to say is, for translation purpose, learning one additional language alsohelps us understand things easier and faster. I used to help one colleague to translate a

Khmer official letter to English containing the word . She also learns both French andEnglish. She thought if it is objet in French, it should be object in English. But somethingcrossed our mind. In English letters, we summarize the meaning in the subject lineand thereis no object line. But it is still true that we use objetin French letters. So the answer must bethe culture differences. When we learn one language we learn the culture of that language.

Finally, we agreed that is objetin French and is subjectand not objectin English.

Phnom Penh, 23 March 2012

THARA Rathvisal