bitful

My commiseration to the unfortunate soul who translated Frédéric Beigbeder's novel 99 Francs from French into Italian (Lire 26.900). The narration is jam-packed full of media language, advertising claims, slogans and French contemporary cool talk.

I can imagine the translator spending two weeks in order to translate telmor and finally deciding to leave it in French, without even a small footnote.

Here it is then: telmor is simply the word mortel with its syllables swapped over. Mortel literally translates into deadly but has started being used in street slang to mean great, fantastic, cool. Inverting the syllables is typical of the verlan slang that originated in less than privileged areas and was subsequently adopted by anyone who strives (a little too hard) to be seen as übercool. The result more often than not is rather pathetic.

It's as if I took up a mockney accent in the UK, without realising that it probably would not blend in nicely with my (drunken) pseudo-Welsh singing intonation.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004 at 6:03 am and is filed under uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.