Tuesday, February 02, 2016

This is why French flummoxes me

This is a headline from the French version of Slate:

La démocratie américaine a encore beaucoup à nous apprendre

Translated directly, it is
The democracy american has still a lot to us to teach.

Or as we would say
American democracy still has a lot to teach us.

Took me five minutes to translate that one bitty sentence.....


2 comments:

Tabor said...

Don't be too literal. Just get is "jist" as they say.

Cerulean Bill said...

In fact, being literal is a downfall in translations. But I doubt anyone will ever mistake me for native-born French....