The Penn Stater Magazine

Parlez-Vous My Language?

July 23, 2010 at 10:59 am Tina Hay 2 comments

According to Babel Fish, "serrurerie" in French means iron work; "blindage" means shielding; and "cles minute" means "keys minute." In short, I have no idea what goes on at this store.

One of the frustrations of traveling to another country is that I have pretty much zero ability to speak the local language. I had some Spanish in high school, but needless to say it didn’t help me much in France or Germany.

Before the trip, I bought an audiobook called French: Learn in Your Car and put it on my iPhone, but I wasn’t as disciplined about listening to it as I should have been. Which is to say, I think I listened to one chapter.

Plus I’m just completely intimidated by the French “r,” not to mention all those vowel sounds that we don’t have in English.

(It becomes especially cruel when I want to ask for butter for my baguette—the French word for butter is beurre, and the combination of those weird vowel sounds and the “r” thing makes me want to just say, “Never mind—I’ll eat it plain.”)

According to the sign, this stand in Nuremberg sells lebkuchen (gingerbread) that is gluten-free and made "ohne mehl" (without flour).

It was great to have Mark Godin as one of our two tour managers from Collette Vacations—although he lives in Rhode Island, he has a degree in French (or maybe French literature?) from Johns Hopkins, and he speaks the language fluently. He also speaks pretty good German. Mark served as our translator on many occasions.

A website I found useful in writing blog entries was Babel Fish, which lets you translate anything from one word to a whole block of text from just about any language into just about any other language.

I also downloaded a few iPhone apps to help me translate on the go, with mixed results. The one called “English to French Translation Phrasebook” and its counterpart, “Francais a l’Anglais Translation Phrasebook,” seemed lame—their vocabularies were limited, and when I’d type in a word, more often than not they wouldn’t be able to find its equivalent in the other language.

An app called “iSpeak French” was much better, although it required an Internet connection. At lunch at a sidewalk café in Kaysersberg with Ted ’59 and Lottie Dempsey and Marilyn ’67 and Marvin Mashner ’67, ’69g, I turned on my data roaming and used the app to translate the menu for our group. Choucroute turned out to be sauerkraut (very helpful to know, for those of us who hate sauerkraut). Jambon was ham. And lardon—which was mentioned in just about every entrée—was bacon.

I was telling my table-mates that I know one very essential phrase in French: Un verre de Coke Light avec des glaçons, s’il vous plait. It means: “A glass of Coke Light with ice cubes, please.” But, I said, I’m never sure if I’m saying it correctly. To which Marvin replied with a laugh: “You’ll find out whether you said it correctly when the waiter brings you a bucket of paint.”

Tina Hay, editor

NEXT: Eating Like the Locals

Entry filed under: Alumni Association. Tags: Babel Fish, Collette Vacations, English to French Translation Phrasebook, Francais a l'Anglais Translation Phrasebook, French language, French: Learn in Your Car, iPhone language apps, iSpeak French, Lottie Dempsey, Marilyn Mashner, Mark Godin, Marvin Mashner, Ted Dempsey.