This was La Rochelle - kinda provincial town on the coast. I don’t think most of the locals had ever left the Poitou-Charentes area, let alone been abroad.
I think that might be ‘Golden Sun fraudsters get 5 year prison sentence.’
Oplichters - no idea, but the article afterwards is talking about fraud.
kirjgen - maybe like the German word kriegen, to get. I did think it might be fight (like in the word Krieg - you know, as in Blitzkrieg), but scanning the rest of the article I think the sentence has only just been handed down, so get fits better.
Jaar - year. Jahr in German.
Cell - this is a guess, but it’s like the word cell (for prison cell) in English and it just makes sense in context.
The rest of that article is slightly more difficult than the other one (which was the top article when I opened the page), but that’s partly because business language tends to be more difficult and partly because I find the article less interesting, so my brain’s less motivated to understand it.
Canal Plus is a pay station, vs. TF1, France 2, France 3, Arte and M6, which are all free channels. Of the latter 5, only Arte might show subtitled stuff from time to time and since it’s, well, Arte, it’s more likely to be a Slovak documentary about traditional basket weaving across the ages than something that’d grip the average viewer. Canal Plus used to be something of a luxury (and an adolescent fantasy - they’re the only broadcast channel to air porn flicks).
Of course, these days it’s easier to get cable/satellite channels that do show foreign stuff in both versions, letting the viewer choose which one to watch. But until the mid nineties or so, it was Canal or nothing, and not everyone could afford Canal - as of 2000, they only had 14 million subscribers over the whole of Europe and N. Africa.
That’s a superb effort, I’m really impressed. I wonder if you’ll be able to get the gist of a spoken news bulletin too.
great effort. Keep her father out of jail, rather than ‘get’
Excellent. Telegraaf is another newspaper, as you might have guessed.
Searching hard needs to be taken literally here: they’re actually searching for the letter. ‘Boven water komen’ means to surface, i.e. for the letter to appear. ‘want’ is because. NOS is one of the Dutch public broadcasters, devoted mostly to news and current affairs. RVD (rijksvoorlichtingsdienst) is the service that deals with the media on behalf of the royal family, which is not supposed to be involved in politics (hence Maxima’s stated intention not to get involved)’
‘wil’ !~ ‘will’, but rather ‘wants to’. ‘zit vast in’ - he’s in jail there.
You did well.
‘Het onderstreept de snelle opkomst van het land’ - it underlines the fast rise of the country;
‘… de verschuiving van economische macht’ - de shift of economic power’;
‘richting het oosten’ - towards the east.
‘meldde the Chinese douane’ - Chinese customs reported
‘daarmee’ - ~ therewith, i.e. in doing so
‘die waarschijnlijk X bedroeg’ - which probably amounted to X
oplichter - fraudster. Oplichten = to lift, but also denotes scamming or defrauding somebody
krijgen - to get (only in 19th century texts might it mean to do battle)
cel - cell
jaar - year
X jaar cel krijgen - to be convicted to X years of prison
@Svejk: some of that goes to show that cultural knowledge can be as important as knowledge of grammar and vocab. I could work out what the words in Rijksthingy meant, but that wasn’t enough to tell me they were specifically for the royal family. If I’d known who the NOS were then I might have been able to translate that paragraph better.
Is your name from the good soldier, btw?
Today I’m supposed to be having a big tidy up, but this is much more enjoyable.
I speak a tiny amount of French too - really tiny: listening to one language tape 16 years ago and taking a Saturday morning class which started in Spetemeber just gone. However, even that tiny amount of learning helps with Dutch too. Like the word douane, which I’m pretty is customs in French. Mind you, I probably know that word from seeing it written on signs at airports.
Oh well. I’ll stop now. 
You’re right, there’s a lot of context to this article that you won’t get unless you study Dutch society for a bit. You would need to know about the NOS and the RVD, for instance, but also about the (complicated) role of the royal family in Dutch politics. My name, by the way, does indeed refer to the good soldier - easily one of my favourite reads ever. Anyway, I’ll let you get to your tidy up as I should be getting back to work. I was off to a good start by getting up early but I feel my head-start is being jeopardized by this thread 
I’m annoyed at my self for not getting ‘houd’ (like hold) and will (which is German for want, and the Dutch for will would be closer to werde). The royal family stuff makes sense, though, because the British Royal family is also supposed to stay out of politics.
I read Svejk in German and tried it in Czech (was living in Slovakia at the time) but got completely lost in the latter.
FTR, you wouldn’t say ‘convict someone to x years in prison’ in English. It would definitely be ‘sentence.’ Even Dutch people don’t get absolutely everything completely perfect.
I’d be surprised if there were more than a handful of French families receiving SKY in the entire country. A lot of Brit expat family perhaps but that’s all. There isn’t any legal way to receive SKY in France and with the French cable networks providing BBC Prime, I imagine that most parents would be happy with that for their kids learning needs.
Also very, very few shows are subtitled and the ones that are tend to be on ARTE (something close to PBS in the US ?)
I don’t think I’ve seen an English language-based tv program that has been subtitled, on terrestrial TV, besides Blackadder in 2005.
Interesting. I distinctly remember watching at least three or four then-current UK programmes - including Red Dwarf and one of those awful Sharpe series. Plus the family I stayed with and at least one of their neighbors were recieving Sky channels (not sure if it was legal).
This was in 1993, though.
Same way many children of immigrants all over don’t ever learn their parents’ language: if the parent does not speak to the children in that language, it’s no advantage at all.
One of my biggest frustrations with languages is linked to the fact that I speak Spanish, English and Catalan. Since Catalan is one of Spain’s co-official languages, people take it for granted that I’m a native Catalan speaker, even before they find out that my mother is from Catalonia (which I’m not). Thing is, I’m 41 years old, I’ve been speaking Catalan for about 20 years (I started studying English in 4th grade), and she’s adressed me spontaneously in Catalan once in my whole life. She can’t bring herself to speak to me in Catalan even though I’ve requested it repeatedly. My brothers do not speak Catalan, I speak it because I went to college in Catalonia and took advantage of the Catalan Government’s free classes for adults, not because of my mother - at all. But I’m assumed to be a native Catalan speaker.
English? 31 years on it, 5 years living in the US, 2 years living in Scotland, “natives” (both those who actually have English as a second language and monolinguals) mistake me for American, I’ve got the official ESL degree of the Spanish government, got both the Cambridge Proficiency Certificate and a 100-100-97 score in the TOEFL before living in the US, but because I was born in Spain there’s people who will never consider me good enough to translate/interpret from Spanish into English, teach a class in English (I mean corporate training, not ESL although in theory I’m qualified for it) or write a white paper in English. There’s many people who hate “Bologna”, but if all that unified EU stuff serves to get people to accept that having the whatever-is-the-highest official certificate means you’re “native level”… I welcome our new bolognese overlords!
But he had lots of other advantages besides having a mother - and his mother’s entire extended family that he saw at least three times a year, none of whom spoke Spanish - and he still managed to have an unusually low level of English. That really is very odd indeed.
Sorry, but I’m really not sure what you mean about Bologna.
Translators are pretty much never employed to translate into a language that is not their native language. That goes for English people who are fluent in other languages, too. The rest of the stuff you talk about is daft - you certainly are fluent enough to deliver training course and so on - but, for translation, all other things being equal, a native speaker is always preferable.
“Bologna” is where the meeting out of which the current push for standardized educational levels throughout the EU came took place. It’s also shorthand for that push and for its (often daft) implementation.
Yes, but I’m considered native in Catalan (my third language) and people with English as their second, third or Nth language but born in a country that has English as an official language, or in the US, are considered native in English; people who grew up speaking English at home (both parents anglo) and going to the American School from kindergarten until 12th grade, but who were born in Madrid, aren’t. That’s what I have a gripe with. There should be better ways to define “native” than What Color Is Your Passport.
The guy who posted this ad in a translators’ website is considered native, <> are my edits to remove identifying info:
That’s interesting, because I know some translators in London who were not born in the country of the language they’re translating to - their parents were and they’ve spoken the language (Indian subcontinent languages and Chinese) from infancy. They work for the state in various forms, too, not in some dodgy unofficial capacity.
Are you sure about how ‘native speaker’ is defined?
Weird that I’ve never heard of this stuff in Bologna - and I’m an EFL teacher.
Well I have to admit that altho’ I was aware of both the cause & the effect I didn’t know the geographical origin - anyway down the line we’ll feel its influence more and more.
You may have noticed that the newer editions of some course books (especially Cambridge University Press) give the CEF level on them now… Or that your school is starting to run / run more CLIL courses which enable teachers to teach their own subject thro’ English (or another European language) … Already the numbers of elementary and pre-intermediate adult learners are falling across the EU and, as more countries improve language provision in schools, EFL will find itself increasingly under pressure to provide more than “just English”, learners are becoming more demanding & expect very targeted training - personally I’ve got three Business Skills seminars this week alone, twelve years ago I remember the absolute shock of being asked to run one.
It’s also interesting to note that the language requirement for taking the CELTA itself is stated in terms of CEF level rather than an actual exam result (IIRC it’s C1 but I’m not 100% certain.)
Nava I feel for you, I recently trained up a French lass who is a very competent EFL teacher and could “pass for native” but can she get a visa for Japan ? Nope. Sadly a lot of language schools perpetuate the myth with “all our teachers are native English speakers” type flannel - omitting to mention that some are unqualified and others pretty incompetent.
I know about the CEF levels - I even referenced them in my first post in this thread. I had just never heard of Bologna in the way Nava’s talking about - I can’t imagine anyone would hate the CEF levels, so there’s obviously more to it.
By many people, yes, as Cat Jones pointed out. That definition is ok as a rule of thumb to start from, but when it informs and defines corporate procedures (from who gets hired to what training they have access to), it stops working.
I can see making a distinction between “native” and “native level”, but for most language-related tasks (from teaching to interpreting), I’d rather have a “native level” foreigner than someone whose claim is having the passport.
My apologies for the hijack, by the way: I was trying to explain the part about how a mother who doesn’t consider it important to teach her culture to her children is an obstacle rather than a bonus and derailed myself.