The English-French Dictionary of Running Idioms
In the crush of an antique train carriage, the man struggle to
remove his black tailored jacket. Of a stocky, athletic build, he
defied a precise age, but one could notice his dark hair greying around
the temples. Despite the awkward haste to disrobe, his cigarette
dangled coolly, complacently, from his clenched lips as he uttered the
immortal phrase:
‘We are going to pass him at tobacco.’*
Huh? They might need to work a little harder on the English translation of that one!
But in fact that’s the entire point of the new English-French Dictionary of Running Idioms by Jean-Loup Chiflet (“John Wolf Whistle”); and the humour generated from exact word-for-word translations of the French into English and English into French is superb! The text is illustrated by comic book scenarios from the Franco-Belgian comics’ series, Blake and Mortimer, providing vibrant visual examples for all the phrases.
All around the world, language learners can relate to the amusement
of finding a new phrase which means something very profound and precise
in the new language, but sounds ridiculous phrased verbatim in the
learner’s original language. It’s then that the lesson is learnt about
translating concepts rather than words, and it’s the same for any
German translation, Italian translation, Russian translation, Spanish translation or Arabic translation.
Here are some examples from the dictionary:
- ‘It doesn’t eat bread’ (‘Ça ne mange pas de pan’ – for ‘It is not important’)
- ‘He was pedalling in the sauerkraut’ (‘Il pédalait dans le choucroute’ – ‘He was mixed up’)
- ‘They were taking their bladders for lanterns’ (‘Ils leur faisaient prendre des vessies pour des lanternes’ – ‘They were trying to pull the wool over their eyes’)
It’s evident that cultural context is essential for translation – for both the English and the French phrases!
* ‘On va le passer à tabac’ (‘We are going to beat him up’)
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