Stretching
As you know, English and French have many Cognates. However, if you're
prepared to stretch a little, you can easily double or triple the number
of words you understand. In this section, we will examine different
stretching strategies you can apply.
Stretching Meaning
Understanding a text in French usually means making guesses about the
meanings of words. It also means being prepared to stretch a meaning,
that is, to take a French word whose basic meaning you know and stretch
this meaning to one that fits into the context in English.
For example, many common adjectives are used differently in French
than in English, so you have to stretch their meanings to understand
the phrase they are in. The following sentence deals with levels of
consumption in the Massif Central, a region in Central France. Try to
stretch the meaning of faible:
Le niveau de consommation y est plus faible
que dans le reste de la France.
Faible (a cognate of what word in English?) usually means
weak. But in English we don't speak of weak levels
of consumption. A better word would be low.
Of course, it's not always necessary to find exactly the right word
in English. You can understand without being able to come up with the
right English equivalent. But stretching prevents you from getting
hung up on a word that doesn't seem to fit.
You particularly need to stretch in the case of little words, common
articles and prepositions, whose exact translation into English may
vary widely. Words like de and à are
grammatical linkers whose exact meaning is less important than the fact
that they join up two words or phrases. Similarly the articles are often
used differently in English and French. Translation of these little
words calls for lots of flexibility. Note that in many cases, the proper
translation of these little words is zero translation. (Douter
de ces résultats = to doubt these results.)
Note too that sometimes you have to add little words in English (L'ozone
filtre une grande partie des UV-B = The ozone filters out...).
English Family Stretching
Many cognates correspond almost exactly to a word in English: institution,
oxygène, industrialisation, ridicule. But you can expand
the number of words you recognize by thinking of word families.
If you know the English word family:
a respirator, artificial respiration, respiratory diseases
it shouldn't be hard to understand the French verb respirer.
Il ne respire plus
He's not breathing any more / He's stopped breathing.
Dont forget too that because the word order of concatenated nouns is
different in French, there are many compound words like bicarbonate
de soude that you'll have to change back to English word order.
And there are other interesting cases where you have to play around
with the order of elements within a word: l'acide chlorhydrique,
un talkie-walkie...
Some word families are similar in French and English: believe,
belief, believer; croire, croyance, croyant. But lots of families
are incomplete and have adopted members to fill in gaps. In French there
is a nice homogeneous family acheter, un achat, un acheteur,
but English only has to buy and a buyer.
For the thing you buy, we use the word purchase, which
comes from another family. However, when you read La location
[=renting] est plus avantageuse que l'achat you should be able
to think of the French family acheter, un achat, un acheteur,
and the corresponding English family to buy, a purchase, a buyer.
Phonetic Stretching
When looking for cognates, don't just look for words that are spelled
exactly the same. Many times, small differences in spelling can be ignored.
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