Je n'y pouvais pas imaginer!

In his book Boulangerie Paul Rambali quotes Pierre Prévert (incorrectly attributed to Jacques Prévert) from the film short Paris mange son pain:

"The menu of Paris is a song, and bread is the chorus."

La baguette in particular is a quintessential part of la culture française.  There is not much a Frenchman wouldn't do, no distance too far to travel to carry that singular goodness tucked under his arm.  But have things changed?  The video below demonstrates, for me at least, the ultimate sin of fast food against French culinary culture




If, as Rambali says, "The history of the baguette is the history of France.", then what do vending machine baguettes mean for the future of France?

What a Cool Job!

I read this article in today's Post Standard.  What a great job!  Translating for movies!  How fun would that be!  I found it particularly interesting the issues they faced trying to translate Larry the Cable Guy's "redneck" lines.  This is (yet another reason) why translators will never replace language learning.  Slang is constantly changing, and the nuances of regional dialects are too many to be accurately replicated by machine translation.  The human factor will always be necessary for communicating with those who speak other languages.  For those of you interested in drama, or careers in that field, this provides interesting food for thought.  Whether as subtitle writer, or actor who dubs in French knowing another language will make you more marketable!