TESTING YOUR FRENCH

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 2305, 25 November 1925, Page 14

TESTING YOUR FRENCH

Most English travellers in France amuse themselves nt one time or another with tho game of literal translation. It becomes a craze to collect the street signs, advertisements, and public notices, and to offer them in literary English to a fellow-traveller for re-translation.

It can be made an endless and ingenious game. “Forbidden to incline oneself without” is the first and most familiar of railway warnings, and most people can say that backwards. Less easy is “Gentlemen tho travellers are requested not to throw from the train windows bottles or other things of a kind to incommode the agents of the road-of-iron who may be working out of sight”; but "In view to permit the visit rapid and practical of the most interesting castles on tho edges of the Loire ,the Company of Orleans organises circuits ag below” is simple enough.

Here are some others —more amusing than “le problome des mots crolses”:— Tho tram-way car arrests itsell under the beak of gas. For the publicity in this programme to address oneself at the central publicity. See actually the delicious creations for the mode actual! The Friends of the Plano will hold an evening, and the circulation will be Interdicted during the executions. Red for the lips the most adherent. Come and see the quantity considerable of bedrooms in all styles! This depilatory attacks the down in her root by penetration of the ■ follicle hairy, the ■ which ar« not able to realise powders, pastes, nor creams. When the players of this game become expert, they can go on from single sentences to short stories, beginning brightly after this fashion: “Genevieve, wakening herself, put on her jump-from-bed, and made a careful toilet. Then in her costume tailor, high novelty in tissue squared with new Scottish dispositions, wearing gloves of kid iced, a hat garnished in ostrich, and carrying an umbrella solid against water, she went to meet Gustave. He approached in a new overcoat and complete vestment on fantastic drapery”—and so on.