It’s back to work for Communications Européennes and STI!
We all hope you’ve had a great summer and are looking forward to working with you again on your translation projects.
💎What’s new on our side?
New this autumn: we are now producing a quarterly newsletter! It’ll contain a description of a particularly challenging project managed by the CE and STI teams, a ‘Did you know?’ section, plus translation-related news and facts.
🤔This issue’s challenging project
CE rose to the challenge for a multinational in the automotive sector, co-ordinating an urgent, multi-lingual, staggered-delivery project right in the middle of August! We enlisted the help of 20 translators to translate the contents of a mobile app. They had to contend with constraints of space, terminology and working platform because everything had to be done entirely in Excel! Our team did a great job in managing this project. We were rigorous across all aspects, communicating with our translators, carrying out quality control, meeting the deadlines and keeping our client up to speed.
🤓Did you know?
The French language has a handy term to describe the beginning of September, the return to work, but above all the return to school: that’s right – it’s ‘rentrée’! This useful term denotes a real concept and is used in many areas, unlike common European languages such as English, Spanish, German or Italian, which use it exclusively for ‘back to school’: ‘back to school’, ‘regreso a clases’, ‘Schulanfang’, ‘ritorno a scuola’.
🌍Translation anecdote
It was hard to miss this summer’s Olympic Games in France! The whole country was buzzing with the achievements of our amazing French athletes. The Olympic flame was extinguished on 12 August, but let’s take a look back at the first time it shone at the start of the Games: something happened as a result of a question of translation! It was 1928 and the Olympic Games were being held in Amsterdam. Pierre de Coubertin, former President of the International Olympic Committee at the time, wrote a letter to the athletes of all nationalities asking them to ‘conserver et d’entretenir parmi [eux] la flamme de l’olympisme rénové’ (preserve and keep alive among [them] the flame of renewed Olympism). In the Netherlands, the meaning of this French expression was lost in translation and the Dutch understood it as a request to light a real fire! This led to the first lighting of the Olympic flame in a cauldron, a tradition that continues to this day. Were it not for this confusion in the translation, we might not have this fine tradition today!
Source: https://www.pressreader.com/france/le-figaro-sport/20240417/281616720412774
