par Uri Sluckin | Avr 18, 2016 | English, Français, Global, Tradwell
This week marks 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare. The characters he invented, the worlds he created and his feelings and thoughts resonate within humanity forever. Nelson Mandela, not a native English speaker, born a son of a Xhosa chief in Transkei said: “Shakespeare always seems to have something to say to us.” Shakespeare’s life as universal artist (poet and playwright), starts with the First Folio of 1623. His legacy includes introduction of new words (“equivocal”, “prodigious” and “antipathy”, were first used by Shakespeare). Read more Today we all use Shakespeare’s lines: “a fool’s paradise”; “the game is up”; “dead as a doornail”; “more in sorrow than in anger”; “cruel, only to be kind”; and many more. His phrases have been used as titles of hundreds of books and films from Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) and The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner) to The Glimpses of the Moon (Edith Wharton) and The Dogs of War (Frederick Forsyth). Besides making the English language more dynamic, Shakespeare has tickled our imagination like no other playwright: Hamlet, Juliet’s Nurse, Macbeth, Mistress Quickly, Lear, Othello, Shylock, Portia, Prospero and Romeo … the list of classic archetypes goes on to the end (Macbeth), boasting characters perhaps closer to us than any others in the English litterature. The motto of the Globe, his theatre, was Totus mundus agit histrionem (The whole world is a stage). The titles of his plays are so quintessentially English: As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing and All’s Well That Ends Well. Typically, Shakespeare seems to have left the stage without looking back. He just...
par Uri Sluckin | Fév 13, 2016 | Astuces traduction, English, Français, News, Tradwell
Eh oui, si vous souriez, mieux, si les plaisanteries et jeux de mots dans une langue étrangère vous font éclater de rire, cela confirme que votre maitrise est complète. Les plus grands humoristes ont souvent eu recours à la boutade, trait d’esprit faisant souvent appel au paradoxe. Les anglais sont connus pour leur humour double entendre. In French, Raymond Devos disait : « J’adore être pris en flagrant délire.» En anglais, the play on words was used a lot by Shakespeare « That dreamers often lie» the pun is that dreamers lie in bed but also lie about dreams. Lisez les puns (boutades en jeux de mots) gagnantes du récent Dave’s Leicester Comedy Festival ci-après pour vérifier si vous avez de l’humeur (sic). offre des explications gratuites à ceux qui s’y perdent ! Get it ? Start laughing now My English teacher recently recovered from a bowel cancer operation… and he tried to show me a semi colon. What’s the difference between a hippo and a zippo? One is really heavy and the other is a little lighter. I’ve got a joke about a fat badger, but I couldn’t fit it into my set. I work in a paper factory, where my responsibilities are twofold. Last week I called a lady a watering hole but I meant well.. I got caught up in a freak accident last year when I knocked two bearded ladies off their tandem bike. I saw a sports car being driven by a scantily clad sheep. It was a lamb bikini. I sent a food parcel to my former wife. Fed Ex. This government thinks that flood defenses are a...
par Uri Sluckin | Fév 7, 2016 | Astuces traduction, English, Français, News, Tradwell
Not the oignon, s’il vous plaît: fury as France changes 2 400 spellings and drops some accents. French linguistic purists have voiced online anger at the removal from many words of one of their favourite accents – the pointy little circumflex hat (ˆ) that sits on top of certain vowels. Around 2 400 words can be spelt differently, although it’s not mandatory. Traditionalists, including Tradwell will stick to the original spelling. Read more The idea is to make it easier to learn seemingly difficult words. Tradwell has always persisted in spelling weekend without the hyphen in its French travails. The circumflex will be removed from above the letters I and U where the accent does not change the pronunciation or meaning of the word. The far-right Front National waded in with party vice president Florian Philippot declaring “the French language is our soul” and the centre right mayor of Nice Christian Estrosi calling the reforms “absurd”. Tradwell is voicing its doubt as to Christian’s ability to write correctly what he says, circumflex or not. Florian’s protests hardly concern those familiar with writing. No such debate over the Channel, but what about English words spelled one way and pronounced the other? How about Wednesday spelled and becoming Wensday when spoken? It’s all down to Woden, an Anglo-Saxon god associated with both fury and poetic inspiration. He also had a career in curing horses and carrying off the dead, and Wednesday is his day. Shakespeare tried to match pronunciation with his very reasonable « Wensday, » it didn’t work. Woden got to keep his ‘d’ and his day. Receipt: when the word came into English...
par Uri Sluckin | Oct 23, 2015 | English, Global, News, Tradwell
Tradwell doesn’t do politics; well not unless politics infringe upon its hereditary right to dispense transcending translation tips, known as triple t within the corporation. This is just the case with the farce being played out at this very moment, a play so comically brilliant that it deserves a chapter. A communication coup so violent that we need to calm the reader by comparing what’s going on in France to what Shakespeare taught us about power and corruption, as in act 5, scene 2 of Hamlet. In the very last scene, the violence, so long suspended, erupts with dizzying momentum. Characters drop one after the other, poisoned, stabbed, and, in the case of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, executed, as the theme of revenge and justice reaches its conclusion in the moment when Hamlet finally kills Claudius. Read more At the end, the arrival of Fortinbras effectively raises the question of political legitimacy once more. In marked contrast to the corrupted and weakened royal family lying dead on the floor, Fortinbras clearly symbolises a strong-willed, capable leader, though the play does not address the issue of whether his eventual rule will restore the moral authority of the state. I let readers place the actors in the roles we see as interchangeable with 3 main royal political families testing the various means of mutual destruction: Les Républicains, erstwhile known as UDF and led by the has been but destined to become once again French president Nicolas Sarkozy, the PS led, we use the term sparingly, by the actual French president François Hollande, and the far right party driven by an older, yet...
par Uri Sluckin | Oct 13, 2015 | English, Global, Tradwell
Hello Neil, You’re a major trend-setter, if there ever was one. In the day and age when correspondence means text or twitter, just a hundred or so characters strung out into a few meaningless phrases with no punctuation and mandatory misspelling to prove that one is digitally aware and in tune with one’s children, you actually went to a post office (it’s refreshing to know that they still have them in LA), inquired how many stamps would be needed to make certain that an envelope weighing 20 grams would be safely hand-delivered six thousand miles away by a Gallic postman doing his morning rounds in a yellow, electrically-powered mail van and slotted into a stone-chiselled letterbox of a sub-Parisian village property in a village where two museums (Maison Louis Carré, the only private house built in France by Alvar Aalto and Maison Jean Monnet where the now-crumbling Europe was devised in the early fifties) and Fondation Brigitte Bardot (the house where she swung in the seventies now legged to her own menagerie of cats with no tail and goats with no purpose) mark the time chimed out by the two sixteenth century bells (Marie and Martinne forged in 1555) of the Gothic church, erected on the ruins of a Byzantine worship. Read more Licking the two stamps, you actually provided a DNA sample that would survive sub-zero temperatures and jetstreams to glide down on a sunny autumn morning and surprise its grateful addressee. I assure you, your transcontinental DNA will live on as an exhibit in a stamp collection that hasn’t enjoyed an arrival for over ten years. Certain...
par Uri Sluckin | Juil 5, 2015 | Astuces traduction, English
Tradwell insiste : la traduction vers l’anglais c’est vraiment un art. Ci-après la suite du poème anonyme qui met en rime les pluriels endiablés : If the plural of man is always called men, Why shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen? If I speak of my foot and show you my feet, And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet? If one is a tooth and a whole set is teeth, Why shouldn’t the plural of boot be called...
