Love for “la langue française”

January 26, 2023February 10, 2023 ~ JB ~ Leave a comment

I love hearing the French language here in Quebec (and trying to learn it but at this point my six-year-old is outpacing me).

Sure, it feels like I need to be a mathematician to say a number, which took some getting used to. I just checked my math and here are two examples:

76 soixante-seize would be “sixty-sixteen” in English
99 (watch out, this one’s a doozy) quatre-vingt-dix-neuf would be “four-twenties-ten-nine” in English

I appreciated the bluntness and honesty when I discovered the French Bible does not call the last book “Revelation” but rather “Apocalypse.”

It took me a minute to accept that a rooster doesn’t say “cock-a-doodle-do” in French but rather “cocorico.” I still say “cock-a-doodle-do” when a rooster sound comes up in conversation, but after opening my mind a bit I came to accept that it can also sound like “cocorico” if you really sell it.

I am getting a handle on Celsius but am currently in a grey area where neither Celcius nor Farenheit make sense without the other one.

So I could write a lot about all the things I love and learn while in living Quebec.

But who in the h-e-double-hockey-stick is Charlie?

Waldo 4 life.

Love for Ukraine

February 27, 2022March 15, 2022 ~ JB ~ Leave a comment

Photo by Kostiantyn Stupak on Pexels.com

Tania was my first Ukrainian friend. When I worked in subtitling+localization, she was on the team of language specialists. A Russian language specialist joined their team, and they were good friends. When I would hear them getting coffee or eating lunch together, I could never tell if they were speaking Ukrainian or Russian. It was enough for me to tell they came from two countries who shared a long history but still two independent countries.

She and I worked on an 80,000+ word menu in Russian (she speaks Ukrainian, Russian, English, who knows what else in that beautiful head of hers). It was for a Blu-ray movie collection set to be released in Russia. Since Blu-rays have loads of special features, trivia, games, it was a *huge* menu (this one also included film history). It had been translated from English into Russian, and Tania could tell the Russian translator had been overwhelmed and made a lot of mistakes.

That Blu-ray menu was in our lives for weeks. I remember walking up to her desk and seeing it open on her screen, and I would ask if I could bring her food or water or any type of sustenance. I was just the middlewoman between the client and the production teams, no language skills here, so all I could do was offer my support. She found every mistake, every typo, every oversight, every inconsistency, and fixed them all. She made it through every round of quality control, patiently answering all my questions since the Russian Cyrillic alphabet was lost on me. I was so happy the day I walked over and could tell her, “Let’s go for drinks – the project was approved and shipped, you did it, it’s gone!”

May life imitate that project.

May Putin make all the mistakes.

May Ukrainians find every mistake, receive the support they need, and persevere.

May we all be able to celebrate when he is gone from their country, and may he walk away with a better understanding of human rights and the power of patriotism.

Love for the Habs

July 2, 2021January 9, 2024 ~ JB ~ Leave a comment

While college students in Boston, I received my first gift from my future husband. It was a Montreal Canadiens hoodie, perhaps as a heads-up that hockey was about to become a part of my life. I soon learned that Canadiens is not misspelled but rather it’s the French spelling and that Habs is short for Les Habitants. My favorite joke when I sit down to watch a game with him is “Which one is Wayne Gretzky?” I also used to ask “When do the Habs play the Indianapolis Ice?” but I retired that joke many years ago. We once risked our lives by wearing our Canadiens shirts in Boston when they came to town to play the Bruins (very serious rivalry, luckily no one was hurt but fortunately my future husband had a very intimidating beard at the time).

So I have been watching since the years of Koivu and Kovalev and through the exciting Halák craze, the terrible hit Pacioretty took from Chara where we thought he was dead, these Price years, the bummer trade of PK Subban, and a lot in between.

I was surprised to learn Paul Newman made a hockey movie called Slap Shot that’s quite good. The three Hanson brothers are hilarious, especially during the scene where they start a brawl before the game even starts and then during the National Anthem, when the ref is lecturing them about having a clean game, one of them yells in his face, “I’m listening to the f*ckin’ song!”

And I have learned about the greats like Maurice Richard and Jean Béliveau and Guy Lafleur and the hockey dynasty that is the Canadiens. Crash course: They have won the Stanley Cup more than any other team in history (24 times, 5 of them a row).

So it’s a lot to live up to and things aren’t looking good right now (Tampa Bay leads the series 2-0, and they are currently winning game three 6-3). But hey, they have a good Midwest boy from Wisconsin, Cole Caufield, and Midwesterns are always very helpful. I believe in the Habs and really want them to win. But I also stick around for the games because my husband says ridiculous things like, “I don’t like this commentator. Who does he think he is with that hair? Mozart?”