Caution, c'est pas cochon (mais ca peut etre con)

That is to say, "'Caution' isn't 'cochon' (but it might be 'con')."

Your "caution" is the security deposit you pay before renting an apartment. It's rather huge here in Paris, and in addition to paying that, you have to pay your first rent and typically also the equivalent as a fee to whatever rental agency you had to go through to get the place, which is why it can be "con", a multipurpose swear word that can mean something like "idiot" or "idiotic" or "seriously annoying" (kind of like saying some turn of events is "a bitch", perhaps a bit stronger), or it can mean "damned" as in "that damned gerbil!", or it can mean "cunt", in which case it's (obviously) pretty offensive. A "cochon" is a pig. In French, "caution" and "cochon" are pronounced similarly (the former with a bit more of an "s" sound and the latter with an "sh"), and in my head I'd been spelling the former a lot like the latter. When I thought about it a bit, though, it didn't make a lot of sense to have to give your landlord/lady a pig before moving into one of his/her properties.

The Streets of Paris

There's a funny naming thing going on with the streets ("les rues" en français) in this town. Today I walked past "Rue de Monsieur le Prince", which I thought was kind of cute: literally translated, it means "Mister the Prince", which doesn't really give a good idea of how it's used, but no matter.... Last night, some friends and I found ourselves near Rue de Petit Musc--Street of Little Musk.

There have been others, too--Rue de Nicolas Flamel and Rue Rohan, as I think I mentioned earlier. (If you don't remember this post, it's because it's been a draft for several months, and I only just published it, backdated, of course. For your convenience.)

A nice touch was that the same friends and I spent some time hanging out on Rue des Anglais (Street of the English).

Update V and a friend (Marie) and I have been looking for apartments together. We found one, but to get there we had to walk down Rue Hautpoul, which sounds a lot like "haut poule", "high chicken".

Tetchy Turtle

Lately I (really "we") have been simultaneously revising and translating my projet de thèse (thesis proposal). My written academic French is pretty poor (it's the combination of different syntax and grammatical structures and different ideas about how one should write an academic paper), so I'm pretty reliant on Virginia and some friends (Marie, Jean-Julien, Elisabeth), plus my director. But sometimes no one is within reach and I have to rely on other sources, like Wikipedia.

One of the poems I've written about includes a scene involving a snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina), which I translated, thanks to the above-mentioned source, as "tortue hargneuse"--a phrase that my director, M. Aquien, thought was hilarious. Turns out that a tortue "hargneuse" is any or all of the following things:

scowling
scathing
shrewish
tetchy
bitchy

Apparently, though, it's the real French name for the creature.

On French Words and Their English Cousins

Translation, I'm learning, is a funny art. It's not a matter of looking up the appropriate cross-language synonyms in a dictionary; even intellectually knowing this in advance, though, the fact of it comes as an enjoyable surprise.

I've been working on various short translation and editing projects--mostly tests--that may lead to regular freelance employment, which would be really nice. In the process, I've stumbled across a few of those little gems you may have read about, the sort that seem especially common on the border between English and Chinese or Japanese.

One of my favorites is a possible translation given to me for "Il n'y a pas de reponse a votre recherche," which, I gather, was supposed to be the default no-match response to a search-engine query.
The translation that I was provided with by the software I'm using (and which I wasn't supposed to change) was, I thought, startlingly philosophical:

"There is no answer to your search."