French accent for dummies

Thanks to JKR’s wonderful idea to introduce a French character in her books, the fanfic authors have to deal with English spoken with French accent and snippets of French dialogues.

As a native french speaker, I know that we French often suck in English (and in spite of my best effort, mine is barely adequate. Moreover, since I learned “BBC English” and worked with Americans, I happily mix Briticisms and Americanisms randomly…).

Well, what was my point ? Oh, yes.

Well, I’m sorry guys, but your snippets of French are often worse than mine in English, and the rendering of French accent is often lame (except for our murdering of all “H”). For instance, we don’t pronounce “nozing” but either “noffing” or “nosssing”.

A few days ago, I was grabbing a cup of  (awful) coffee from the vending machine, and a guy from my company was speaking with foreign engineers in globbish with one of the worst accents I’ve ever heard and I gave me an idea.

Well, I sort of buried it.

Then, a few minutes ago, I was reading "Harry Potter and the Veela Bond" by DrgnMstr. A pair of samples : "Of course mon amie" says Fleur to Bill. Sorry, but to Bill, it spells "mon ami". Adressing a girl, you would need an "e" (amie). "We can zit". Nein, that would be a german accent. In french, we handle "sit"...

So here I am with a free of charge (and warranty free) service :

Horace FanFiction French Fixing Service (H4FS)

Just drop me an email (use "Contact" link or send you dialogs to hnihil-h4fs (at) yahoo.fr) and I’ll do my best to fix them realistically...or at least, I can fix the most obvious mishaps ( because our effing grammar is such laden with traps that I'm far for fail safe !)

Comments

[Horace]

I replied to Clell by email, but a couple key points are worth posting here :

That's a very interesting question. Your example translates :
"– Bon, alors, qu'est-ce qui se passe, maintenant ? dit-elle. Il faut revenir dans la salle, ou quoi ?", it's not syntaxically correct, sounds more like spoken language. But the other lines are translated with a more upper class phrasing, and Mme Maxime's accent is emphasised to appear very posh ("commeuttre une eurreur" instead of "commettre une erreur")...In fact, the snippets of text in french in the original book are typographically different (italics) in the french translation.

[Clell65619]

- Your commentary on French characters (and their atrocious stereotyped accents in HP canon and fanon) brought to mind a question I have been wondering for a while.

- In the French editions of the Potter books how do they differentiate between the English speaking people in French and the French speaking people in French?

- For example, Fleur's first line in GOF was “What is it?” she said. “Do zey want us back in ze Hall?” How is this done in the French editions, do they give her some regional dialect phonetically or just ignore the idea that she has and accent?