Each Tuesday afternoon, I go to the building where I have my French lessons, and help someone with their English..This lady is doing exams, and often has texts in French to translate into English. She speaks English very well, although we spend most of the lesson speaking in French (good for me!)

Yesterday we spent the whole hour looking at a text, which was really difficult (even she said so ) cos you not only have to get the tenses right, but also the sense of the sentence...It was great fun..we had an enormous dictionary,and also the text ready translated into English by some professors, and at times the literal translation didn't sound quite right, and so I had to put it into something that sounded correct!

For example; 'Petite révolte qui suffit à épuiser sa colère.. literally 'little revolt that was enough to exhaust his anger' well, we wouldn't use that phrase really, I translated it ' small outburst' so we looked it up in the translation, and they had used ' It was a shy revolt, enough to exhaust his anger'

We decided that our translation was better! ' a small outburst that was enough to exhaust his anger' Sorry professor!!
We basically got the text correct, with one or two differences, not very important ones, for example we used 'painful sinuses' instead of 'his sinuses hurt'...

This is something that my friend will have to do in the exam..she will have 2hrs to translate a text having not seen it before, without a dictionary!!

Rather her than me!!

I have to confess, that I quite enjoyed it, and we will continue next week, and if we have time, I am told we will then translate it back in to English!!