18 August 2016
The Perils of Poor Translation
and of banning the burkini.
by Richard Pooley
The BBC website is my main source of news and I don’t usually have cause to criticize it. But last week the mistranslation in a BBC report of one French word had me fulminating against the actions of a French mayor in particular and right-wing French politicians in general. In fact my anger should have been directed at the BBC. In future, I may rely more on Le Point for my French news.
The Republican mayor of Cannes, David Lisnard, has banned women from wearing the burkini on his town’s beaches. As I am sure you know, the burkini is the latest in a long line of words mistakenly back-derived from ‘bi’ and ‘kini’. The two-piece Bikini swimsuit was invented by a French engineer in 1946, who named it after Bikini Atoll, the site of US nuclear tests. But later swimsuit designers assumed ‘bi’ meant two and so we had monokini, tankini and now burkini, a portmanteau word combining burqa with bikini. The burkini covers the whole of a woman’s body except her face, hands and feet. It allows Muslim women to swim in public in accordance with the Koran’s instruction for them to dress modestly.
Lisnard’s ruling was reported by the BBC as follows (I have put the offending word in bold):
“Access to beaches and for swimming is banned to any person wearing improper clothes that are not respectful of good morals and secularism. Beachwear which ostentatiously displays religious affiliation, when France and places of worship are currently the target of terrorist attacks, is liable to create risks of disrupting public order.”
I was livid. The mayor was saying that it was immoral to be wearing a piece of clothing which covered up almost all of a woman’s body. Yet there was nothing immoral if a woman should choose to wear nothing but the tiniest bikini (and, if she wished, only the bottom half of it). What, in fact, had any of this to do with morality? Wasn’t this just another example of right-wing politicians pandering to the islamophobia of their far-right counterparts in the Front National? The irony that it was the mayor of Cannes who issued this edict also fuelled my ire. Brigitte Bardot was photographed wearing a bikini on the beach during the 1953 Cannes Film Festival to advertise the film she was in – Marina, la fille sans voiles. Such was the moral outrage at the film’s scenes of Bardot in a skimpy bikini, it took five years and a change of title – to Marina, the Girl in the Bikini – before it was released in the USA.
Luckily my wife was the first to hear my tirade. Unlike me, she is fluent in French and has saved me more than once from making too many faux pas during our time in France. She said that the mayor had probably used the word moeurs in his ruling. This, she was confident, would be better translated as habits or customs rather than morals. I checked in my French-English dictionary. She was right (damn it!): mores, habits, attitudes were preferred to morals. I then found the original ruling in French. I was shocked to find that the BBC version was not even a translation of the complete text. It was a précis: whole sentences and phrases missed out, words taken out of context. And “respectful of good morals and secularism” was the translation of “respectueuse des bonnes moeurs et de la laïcité.”
I still neither like M. Lisnard’s wording nor his ban of the burkini. But at least I now understand that he is not banning it for moral reasons. Also, I have since discovered (from the BBC!) that he has allowed a Saudi-financed mosque to be built in Cannes.
A series of mistranslations much closer to home caused confusion and perplexity last Saturday night. British visitors from Belgium, multilingual both, took my wife and me out to one of our favourite restaurants in the nearby village of Martel[1]. The food was excellent, as usual. But the waitress, presumably after hearing us talk to each other in English, began by handing us menus in English. My wife and I had not seen them before. They were brand-new and very smart; they must have cost a fortune to produce.
But the English inside was not smart. A la carte was translated as on the map; filet de boeuf was beef net; and coquilles St Jacques turned into nuts of Saint Jacques. Not only were most words and phrases mistranslated but the instructions on what part of each special menu you could have were incomprehensible. The latter was made even more difficult because we could not fathom whether entrée was being used as in French (starter) or as the British bizarrely do (main course). In the end we asked for French menus and tried to explain why in French. We asked the waitress who had done the translation. She muttered something about the printer but seemed not to know the answer.
Why does an upmarket restaurant like this go to all the trouble and expense of producing professional-looking English-language menus and then not pay for a decent translation? A similar question could be asked of numerous French companies in our part of France: the English of their export marketing material and websites is risible and, sometimes, utterly incomprehensible. We have begun asking our French friends this question and, so far, not been ostracised. If we get any clear and logical answers, I’ll let you know.
Back to the burkini. The Socialist mayor of Sisco, a village in northern Corsica, has banned it too. There was a fight last Saturday on a nearby beach between families of North African origin, some of whose women were wearing burkinis, and local youths, who, along with a tourist, were taking photographs of the women. Hatchets and harpoons were used, the bathers’ cars burned and five people wounded. According to the BBC the mayor, Ange-Pierre Vivoni, said his decision was “nothing to do with racism” and was about “protecting people’s security”. I believe him but M. Vivoni used the word sécurité. Can you protect security? Might not a better translation have been “ensuring people’s safety”?
[1]We sat within sight of the tower where Henry II’s eldest son, known as Henry the Young King or Court Mantel (short coat), died of dysentery while waiting for a message of forgiveness from his father with whom he had been at war.
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