For our francophone colleagues no problem, go and read directly in French that post. For others, I give below the English translation.
Your kind attention please, exclusive information! Yours truly has sacrificed his Saturday evening for a highly cultural transmission. He is now giving you this hot news in advance: the new Miss France is an upcoming interpreter!
The news arrived just now: Malika Menard, a girl from Normandie, who is anything but a cow, was elected as Miss France 2010. The 22 year old lady is studying in the third year of the licence course in Applied Foreign Languages (Licence L.E.A.), English-Italian (well, I am reminded of my young days) at Caen, with the idea of becoming conference interpreter.
With such talents, no marks for guessing that whispered interpreting will have a bright future!
Now back to Dondu N. Raghavan. The allusion to a cow may be incomprehensible to the non-francophones. Actually it is word play in the original French blog post. The sentence in original reads, "Malika Menard, une Normande qui n'a rien d'une vache, a été élue Miss France 2010". I was a little foxed by the reference to a vache in this context. Then I took recourse to my colleagues in the word reference forum.
The query raised therein along with the responses can be seen here. Here I was informed that the word Normande refers to a lady from Normandie as well as a cow of the breed Normande.
Hence my allusion to the cow in my translation. Now I went to the original French blog post and gave a comment referring to the word reference forum in question.
Laurent was kind enough in coming to the concerned word reference forum and clarifying as follows.
"I am the author of the original blog post. I was contacted by Raghavan to give some explanation about my sentence. I never meant to make fun about that young lady : I simply made an allusion to the fact that she's from Normandy, but looks nothing like a Normandy cow (Nicomon perfectly understood this).
But anyway, I'm gonna have to correct my blog post: it is not the new Miss France who wants to be interpreter, but Miss Côte d'Azur, who came 6th".
Well, well, even the Miss Côte d'Azur will make a nice whisper interpreter, says Dondu N. Raghavan. :)))
Regards,
Dondu N. Raghavan
"
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