Salons littéraires and student power!

It’s been great to get the blog up and running again this week, albeit not always with the most positive of news. To round the week off, a post from our co-Programme Director, Aedín ní Loingsigh, who, along with Mathilde Mazau, ensured that our students were actively involved in choosing one of the set texts they’ll be studying next semester…

“‘C’était une journée de novembre exceptionnelle’ —  to paraphrase the opening of Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Belles Images — when students and staff members met for French at Stirling’s inaugural salon littéraire. Up for discussion was de Beauvoir’s novel: Les Belles Images. It has been a much-loved core text on the Stirling pre-honours curriculum for many years. But recent feedback prompted us to consider whether we might change it to gain some new perspectives on feminist movements. Annie Ernaux’s 2000 L’Événement was a suggestion that raised a lot of challenging questions. In the end, staff felt these questions were best answered by our students.

Our students rose to the task in a wonderfully engaging way. With the support of staff members, two teams composed of honours-level students presented compelling arguments to help our pre-honours students decide which novel they would prefer to read in Spring 2024. Embodying the spirit and elegance of Dominique, the vengeful but vulnerable mother of de Beauvoir’s main character, Alice, Daisy, Fiona and Heather recreated one of the novel’s iconic scenes to persuade students who had not yet read it that Les Belles Images was a more relevant, entertaining and linguistically rewarding choice for them. And the coup de grâce (we were sure): Ernaux describes the problems of women of her generation. But de Beauvoir diagnoses them and worked actively to solve them.

Team Ernaux responded with aplomb. Dispensing with the array of props used by team de Beauvoir, Marta and Robyn, with tutor Mathilde Mazau, reminded their audience that Ernaux was a Nobel-prize-winning author; that, being a young student, the character of L’Événement was more than relatable to them; and that Ernaux’s style of writing is closer to that of Edouard Louis, an author many of our pre-honours students had already studied and liked. Not shirking from the difficult issue at the heart of Ernaux’s memoir, the team explained that, while aspects of the novel’s engagement with the subject of illegal abortion were difficult, L’Événement deals with an important and topical issue. They reassured students that with the right preparation and guidance, the novel would give rise to informed, sensitive and balanced conversations in class.

In the end, the barnstorming speeches of team Ernaux won out. 80% of the students who were eligible to vote explained that they had been persuaded that Ernaux’s text was more relevant to their lives and that Ernaux’s Nobel-winning status was an important factor in assessing which author they wanted to read. Arguments that had persuaded students to vote for de Beauvoir were balanced towards the belief that it would be more effective for improving vocabulary and that learning more about de Beauvoir would be motivating. The invaluable advice on good taste provided by Les Belles Images was not a deciding factor…

Many thanks to the students who participated so enthusiastically in this event and to tutor Mathilde Mazau for her hugely effective preparation with them. Congratulations to team Ernaux and commiserations to Team de Beauvoir. All is not lost: next year Dominique plans to rise again and fight in the way only she knows how to!”

Thank you to everyone who was involved in organizing and running the salon littéraire and, in particular, to Aedín for sending through this update. We’ll be curious to see what next semester’s Year 2 students make of Ernaux now.

End of semester round-up

There has been lots going on across French at Stirling these past few months, as you’ll have gathered from recent posts. Before the blog goes quiet for a couple of weeks of annual leave, we wanted to just bring you up-to-speed with a couple of pieces of news…

Congratulations to Fiona Barclay who was awarded £100K AHRC Follow-on Funding for Impact and Engagement for a project called ‘Remembering Empire’ that aims to reach new audiences with the findings of the earlier project on ‘Narratives and Representations of the French Settlers of Algeria.’ The project will run for 12 months from 1 July and we’ll be posting more about it once it’s fully up and running.

Elizabeth Ezra, meanwhile, was recently interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed about her book Shoe Reels: The History and Philosophy of Footwear in Film (Edinburgh University Press; co-edited with Catherine Wheatley). The interview is available here on BBC Sounds (the discussion with Elizabeth begins at 18:20).

Over the next few weeks, Cristina Johnston and Aedín ní Loingsigh will be working on the final stages of a paperback edition of Lilian Thuram’s La Pensée blanche that they co-translated with David Murphy last year. Cristina and Aedín gave a joint paper on their experience of collaborative translation and questions of who translates whom as part of Stirling’s Centre for Interpreting, Translation and Intercultural Studies research seminars a couple of months ago.

And last week, Cristina Johnston delivered a training session on Feedback and Assessment in Higher Education for doctoral students. The session was part of a series of workshops on Learning and Teaching that is jointly organised by Pallavi Joshi and Jordan McCullough on behalf of the British and Irish subject associations for French Studies, ASMCF and ADEFFI.

More to follow soon, not least by way of a catch-up on Nina Parish’s recent research trips to Armenia and Poland… Busy times all round!

Languages Week Scotland: Exchanging ideas through Erasmus mobility

In the Autumn, our colleague Aedín ní Loingsigh spent part of the semester on an Erasmus teaching exchange at our partner institution, the Université de Limoges. Languages Week Scotland seems like an excellent opportunity to post her blog article about the experience:

“This past November, I had the immense honour of spending three weeks as Visiting Lecturer for the University of Limoges Masters programmes in ‘Identité et Transferts culturels’ and ‘Management interculturel’. During my time there, I delivered a series of practical translation classes as well as interactive lectures and seminars on Translation Theory.

Given how brief my visit was, my aim was to design classes in a way that encouraged the students to use our contact time to explore connections between aspects of the content we were translating and the questions raised by certain theoretical approaches. An overarching question of much of our time together was the question of translator ‘neutrality’, including the issue of whether a translator should be visible and whether particular texts and contexts require a ‘suitable’ translator, and, if so, who that might be.

We began by looking at the translation theories and practices of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution feminist communities. At the same time, we translated a text written by Lou Sarabadzic on langage inclusif. It was wonderful to see students respond to the ideas of feminist translation and explore the gendered nature of language — and its playful possibilities. Suffice to say that in one class we had a memorable exchange regarding the ingenious and creative use one small student group made of the American term ‘period’ (full-stop) when discussing translation choices in English for an emphatic use of ‘voilà’ in Lou’s feminist text. We also had constructive fun looking at Google Translate in real time. We saw just how biased Machine Translation can be, why the study of gender in translation matters, and how we might translate in a gender-aware way.

We also spent some time looking at the controversy surrounding the Dutch translation of Amanda Gorman’s poem ‘The Hill we Climb’, which she read at Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2021. I was impressed with the students’ thoughtful and open-minded engagement with this complex issue and their willingness to look beyond simplistic representations of the debate. (I should say I was also impressed with their patience when technology failed and we had to try and appreciate Gorman’s powerful reading of her poem on my small laptop screen as opposed to the large projector screen.) We discussed whether it is possible to be ‘neutral’ in translating this poem, whether ‘translator invisibility’ is desirable for all translation contexts, and whether there is an ‘ideal’ translator for a text who fully understands the experience and position of the source-text author. Finally, we mentioned the idea of a translation collective where diversity of experience and opinion is maximized.

One of the topics I particularly enjoyed was tourist translation. We didn’t spend a lot of time on this, but I am keen to explore it more in the future, preferably on location! On one of my many delightful walks in Limoges, I took some photographs to discuss with students the linguistic landscape of the city. Not surprisingly, the city’s key sites have lots of examples of translation, not least the amazing Musée national Adrien Dubouché — an unquestionable highlight of my time in Limoges for the sheer breadth and informative layout of its porcelain collections. In class, we looked at some images of the Découvrir Limoges plaques visitors will notice as they explore the city, and we discussed the challenges and choices made in some of the very condensed translations of the source text.

We also looked at monolingual French signs that might be usefully translated for visitors. One of the most memorable things I saw in Limoges was evidence of an effort to highlight visually more of the city’s long history of producing decorative objects, most famously in porcelain. Scattered around the city centre, if you keep your eyes open, are public stairways with an occasional stone balustrade replaced by one in porcelain. Intrigued, I eventually found an explanation on a sign, but with no translation. So, one of our final tasks at the university was to translate this text. I have suggested to the students that they take their excellent collective translation further and suggest to the City of Limoges that they produce *paid* top quality translations for other public information signs, including, yes, the very funny one we also looked at encouraging people to clean up after their dogs — we never did decide what to do with the opening clause: ‘Pour favoriser l’intégration de votre chien….’ To be continued.

My time in Limoges was too short. I know for certain that I learned as much from the students as I hope they did from me. I know I enjoyed the company and the warmest of welcomes from staff more than I think I let them know. I came back to a university system in the UK about to go on strike. I’m not going to romanticise university life in France. But my own experience in Limoges showed me that, for now at least, university life there seems to have held on to the precious time that is needed for a genuine exchange of ideas. I hope to be back. Thank you.”

Many thanks to Aedín for sending this blog post and, more importantly, for having gone to Limoges in the first place. Our Erasmus partnerships remain incredibly important to us (as do our non-Erasmus ones!) and it’s fantastic when colleagues also manage to benefit from them. And thanks to our friends in Limoges for the great welcome! This new semester will also see other teaching exchanges – we’re looking forward to welcoming Ruth Menzies from the Université Aix-Marseille to Stirling in March and, as it happens, Cristina Johnston will be delivering a guest lecture (virtually) to students on the University of Passau‘s BA in International Culture and Business Studies tomorrow morning. More to follow!

Languages Week Scotland: Reading in other languages

This week is Languages Week Scotland which gives an opportunity to celebrate the signed and spoken languages used and learned across Scotland. We have decided to mark it on the blog by posting an article every day about a wide range of the language learning experiences of our students, friends and colleagues. To start us off, meet Iiris who is in the second year of her degree in International Politics and French at Stirling:

“Studying languages has pretty much always guided my study path and is how I ended up here in Stirling from my hometown of Turku, Finland. It all started with beginning to study English when I was ten. I absolutely hated it and made a point out of not participating or studying for it. It dawned on me that I was learning English even without trying, and the classes would go a lot faster if I just stuck my hand up. After that, I quickly began enjoying English, and when I picked up Swedish and Spanish a few years later, languages became my favourite subject. Instead of high school, I applied to the International Baccalaureate to be able to study in English and wanted to continue to do so at University. I chose Stirling because of being able to study politics and French as equals, which isn’t a given elsewhere. It has been really great, and I’m on track to becoming a polyglot soon, which is really important to me as an aspiring diplomat!

Every time I study a new language, I always just throw myself off the deep end and start reading books I can hardly understand. At first, it’s frustrating and takes a while to get used to, especially if you don’t know the plot or the characters from before. But after a while it becomes tolerable, and usually, after a hundred pages you recognize most of the words. At the end of the book, you know plenty of new words, new phrases and you improved your reading. So it’s definitely worth it, but how to get motivated enough to read a book you don’t understand? 

The first trick is always choosing a book you like! When I was first learning English, I frequented the Fiction in English shelf at the library and chose whatever sounded interesting. I really liked adventure, so I went for books like Young Sherlock or Artemis Fowl. Afterward, I went back to English class and confused my teacher by using words like bloody hell and ambivalent – but I definitely also learned more appropriate and useful words, and quickly aced English class.

Another trick is to have a translator app or a dictionary nearby. When help is near, you don’t get frustrated as quickly. You can download Google Translator on your phone, and then use the camera to scan and translate words and phrases you don’t understand. For this Spring’s Contemporary French and Cultures Course, we were assigned Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Belles Images and Faïza Guène’s Kiffe Kiffe Demain, and I wanted to get a head start and read them over Christmas. These two were the hardest novels I had ever read in French. Kiffe Kiffe Demain uses plenty of slang, and Les Belles Images is challenging to understand even for a fluent speaker. But using the Google scanner got me through tough sentences, and I was able to finish both novels in two weeks. 

I try to boost my learning by making a vocabulary of the words used in a novel. Authors often use similar phrases and writing patterns throughout their texts, which is also why after a hundred pages you already understand the author so much better. When reading Kiffe Kiffe Demain, I initially started by scanning almost entire pages to make sense of what I was reading. After a while, I didn’t need to check at all.

Another trick is to read a book you already love, but in the language that you’re trying to learn. The other national language of Finland is Swedish and I’m currently stuck in a limbo between advanced and fluent. I don’t get much practice in Scotland since I don’t have Swedish friends, but I try to fix that when I vacation in Finland by reading familiar books in Swedish. The Moomin are everywhere in Finland, and I used to read the books watch the series in Finnish a lot. Now, I read them in Swedish, and it’s great because I can deduce the meaning by context and I already know what is going to happen. Most importantly, I know the book is good, so I never get bored.

I take the same technique and use it when watching movies! I choose a movie in the language I want to learn and then choose the same language subtitles. If I want to understand the movie, I’m going to have to read – and quick. This helps your reading but also listening because you can try to listen to the movie and glance at the subtitles for support if you need it. Netflix is full of good French content like Lupin and Les Intouchables you can watch.

First and foremost, my motivation is just to improve my language skills, and reading foreign books does just that. One of my favourite books is Les Misérables, but I am not at a point where I can read it in French yet. But if I keep reading books in French, I will be soon!  Reading is such a good way to learn new vocabulary and phrases without having to repeat a single word to yourself over and over again. You also learn a broader vocabulary beyond what you learn in class, and you too can confuse your teacher by using étourdissante instead of jolie.”

Some fantastic language learning advice from Iiris and a great blog post – thank you very much! As the week goes on, we’ll be posting about everything from teaching exchanges to language assistantships via language ambassadors and much else besides. And since Iiris has mentioned the novel here, we might even post something about the reading group on Les Belles Images Aedín ní Loingsigh is running for our Year 2 students. Bonne lecture et bonne semaine!