Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Harraga and Hittistes III

The coast of Annaba in Algeria, from where
  harraga try to reach France or Spain.

AnAnd even worse (see Harraga and Hittistes II).

Today's El Watan (an Algerian newspaper published in French) reports:

Des harraga âgés de 10 ans en Espagne

Several harraga (African immigrants who try to smuggle themselves into Europe by boat) were intercepted earlier this week by the Spanish authorities as they tried to flee across the Mediterranean on "un petit bateau pneumatique" - that is, a small rubber dinghy.  This time,  it was neither a woman nor a grandfather who was fleeing to the West for a "better life"... but five boys aged 10 and one aged 16. 

The children were found on board alone, with no adults accompanying them.

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Sunday, October 27, 2013

Knowing French makes you more intelligent (allegedly)!

Irregular verbs, unlikely agreements between words, arbitrary genders - every grammarian says the same thing: French is a difficult language to master. But what if this very complexity accounts for the success of French-speaking mathematicians?

French is a "dreadfully difficult and complicated language, full of knots", so says the writer Claude Duneton in his column in Figaro Littéraire. Look at all "its irregular verbs, its participles that don't agree, its out-of-control adjectives, its singular plurals and its old-fashioned tenses" - not to mention its totally arbitrary genders. Why is "
table" feminine and "desk" masculine, and why is it la rose but le lily?

Even grammarians complain about how difficult French is. Claude Duneton, who takes delight in opposing this widely held view, puts forward what he calls a "perfectly gratuitous hypothesis": "What if this very subtlety and these niceties were one of the secret strengths of French? What if the French language encouraged the development of a mathematical way of thinking?" That would help to explain a great mystery:  that "French mathematicians and mathematicians who speak French are at the head of world research".


This article, translated by Culturissima's Dr David Winter, first appeared in the literature section of the French daily newspaper, Le Figaro.

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Walid the blasphemer

Walid the blasphemer embarrasses Palestine

For months he was one of the most hated internet users in the Muslim world. His Facebook page, which went by the name Ana Allah ("I am God"), was full of blasphemous sallies and barefaced arguments in favour of apostasy. But when the mystery poster was arrested at the start of the month, to everyone's surprise he turned out to be a shy young barber from Qalqilya, a small town in the West Bank.

Saturday, April 6, 2013

Fear of the Outsider


Fear of the Outsider: Part One

One of the most compelling themes of New England literature – and a recurrent motif of the region’s films, too – is “outsider-phobia”.

Fear of the outsider or stranger, one might reasonably argue, is part of the literary landscape the world over (in Europe, of course, one immediately thinks of Meursault in Camus’ L’Etranger). 

Nowhere, however, is suspicion – even hatred – of the foreign object more prevalent than in the literary tradition of New England. 

Monday, January 7, 2013

"There are children starving in Africa. Eat your peas"


A very quick post to an interesting blog on Africa that has just been published in the Harvard Business Review. Jonathan Berman's article challenges the stereotypes that so many of us have about the continent and makes refreshing reading for Culturissima, as so much of our work and so many of our clients are based in countries such as Libya, Algeria and Tunisia.

More to follow!

Thursday, January 3, 2013

Two very useful English words that don't exist in French...

Delphine Autret, a Meribel-based translator, has emailed Culturissima the following humorous take on why English language is littered with so many French words... we particularly enjoyed the last paragraph.