Interview Questions

October 14, 2015 simonrkemp Leave a comment

posted by Simon Kemp

You might have seen online or in the news recently that Oxford has released some sample questions from our admissions interviews. We’re trying to make the process by which we select our students from the many excellent candidates who apply to us as clear and understandable as possible. We’re also trying to set straight anyone who thinks an Oxford interview typically involves being asked whether you’d prefer to be a satsuma or a grapefruit (with reasons), or being asked to throw a brick through a window, just to see if you open it first. Neither of these, I hasten to assure you, has any part in our selection process! Rather, our questions are straightforwardly based around what you’ve told us in your sample schoolwork and UCAS statement, and what we’ve told you are our selection criteria for the particular course you’ve applied for.

One newspaper included a sample modern languages question:

Modern languages candidates: What is language?

Helen Swift, of St Hilda’s College, said: ‘Although I would never launch this question at a candidate on its own, it might grow out of a discussion.

‘Students sometimes say they like studying Spanish, for example, because they “love the language”.

‘In order to get a student thinking critically and analytically, the question would get them to consider what constitutes the language they enjoy – is it defined by particular features or by function (what it does)?

‘How does form relate to meaning? And so on.’

I’ve also talked about modern languages interview questions before here, and there’s lots of information about our whole admissions process, including UCAS forms and personal statements, under the ‘Applying to study modern languages’ category of this blog.

Here is the full press release and sample questions released by the university this week:

The questions have been released to mark the deadline day for students to apply to study at Oxford University next year (15 October). Students applying for PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) might be asked about the ethics and economics of bankers’ bonuses, while aspiring engineers might be asked to explain the physical forces that determine whether a ruler stays balanced or topples over when slid along their fingers.

‘We emphasise in all our outreach activity that the interview is primarily an academic conversation based on a passage of text, an object, a problem set or a series of questions relating to the course the applicant has applied for,’ says Dr Samina Khan, Director of Admissions and Outreach at Oxford. ‘But interviews will be an entirely new experience for most students, and we know many prospective applicants are already worried about being in an unfamiliar place and being questioned by people they have not met. We want to underscore that every question asked by our tutors has a purpose, and that purpose is to assess how students think about their subject and respond to new information or unfamiliar ideas. We hope that seeing some of the less obvious questions will reassure prospective applicants that tutors simply want to see how students think and respond to new ideas – we are not interested in catching students out.

‘Interviews are not about reciting what you already know – they are designed to give candidates a chance to show their real ability and potential, which means candidates will be encouraged to use their knowledge and apply their thinking to new problems in ways that will both challenge them and allow them to shine. They are an academic conversation in a subject area between tutors and candidate, similar to the undergraduate tutorials which current Oxford students attend every week.’

Dr Khan adds: ‘It’s important to remember that most interviews build on material students will have encountered in their studies or touch on areas candidates mention in their personal statements. They might include a logic problem to solve for a subject like mathematics, and we will often provide candidates with material to prompt discussion – for example a piece of text, an item to examine, or an image. It is often best to start responding by making very obvious observations and build up discussion from there, rather than assuming that there is a hidden meaning or a highly complicated answer you have to jump to immediately.

‘We know there are still lots of myths about the Oxford interview, so we put as much information as possible out there to allow students to see the reality of the process. We now have mock interviews online, video diaries made by admissions tutors during the interview process, and lots of example questions to help students to familiarise themselves with what the process is – and isn’t – about.’

Here are some sample questions:

Subject: Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE)
Interviewer: Brian Bell, Lady Margaret Hall

Q: Why is income per head between 50 and 100 times larger in the United States than in countries such as Burundi and Malawi?

Brian: The question is focused on perhaps the most important economic question there is: why are some countries rich and some countries poor? As with most economics questions, there is no simple or unique answer. Candidates need to think about all the potential reasons why such income gaps exist. A good starting point is to think about whether the amount of capital and technology available to workers in different countries is the same and if not, why not? US workers are much more productive because they have access to the best technology – the US is at the technological frontier. But why do poor countries not just buy the same technology and be as productive? Possibly, the education levels are too low to allow for the use of such technology or perhaps there are insufficient savings to purchase the technology or the infrastructure might not exist. Good candidates should recognise that institutions matter a lot – respect for property rights and the rule of law appear to be pre-requisites for sustainable development. Other factors might include trade restrictions by the rich world on poor countries exports, civil wars, disease (e.g. AIDS, Malaria) etc. The trick is to think widely and not try and fit the answer to some lesson that has been learnt in school.

Subject: Economics and Management
Interviewer: Brian Bell, Lady Margaret Hall

Q: Do Bankers deserve the pay they receive? And should government do something to limit how much they get?

Brian: This is a very topical question in light of the recent financial crisis. A simple answer might be that since banks are generally private firms and workers are free to work where they wish, then the pay they receive is just the outcome of a competitive labour market. In this story, bankers earn a lot because they are very skilled and have rare talents. It is hard to see a reason for government intervention in this case – though on equity grounds one may want to have a progressive income tax system that redistributes some of this income. A good candidate would wonder why it is that seemingly equivalently talented people can get paid so much more in banking than in other occupations. Do we really believe that bankers are so much better than other workers in terms of skill? An alternative story is that the banking industry is not competitive and generates profits above what a competitive market would produce. This would then allow workers in that industry to share some of those profits and so earn much more. In this case, there is a role for government intervention – making the market more competitive. The key point about this question is trying to get candidates to think about the economics of pay rather than just whether they think it is fair or not.

Subject: Biomedical Sciences
Interviewer: Robert Wilkins, St Edmund Hall

Q: Why is sugar in your urine a good indicator that you might have diabetes?

Rob: This question builds on general knowledge and material studied at school in biology and chemistry to assess how students approach a clinically-relevant problem. It’s commonly known that diabetes is associated with sugar (glucose) in the urine; this question asks students to think about why this occurs. Students have usually have learnt that the kidneys filter blood to remove waste products, such as urea, that must be eliminated from the body but many other useful substances which must not be lost – including glucose – are also filtered. Given that glucose is not normally found in the urine, students are asked to speculate as to how it can all be recovered as the urine passes through the kidney’s tubules.
The process involves reabsorption by a carrier protein that binds the glucose molecules and moves them out of the renal tubule and back into the blood. Students should appreciate that, in binding glucose, the carrier will share properties with enzymes, about which they will have learned at school: the capacity to reabsorb glucose is finite because once all of the carriers are working maximally, no further glucose reabsorption can occur. A successful applicant will make the connection that an elevated level of glucose in the blood in diabetes leads to increased filtration of glucose by the kidneys and saturation of the carriers that perform the reabsorption, resulting in ‘overspill’ of glucose in the urine.

Subject: Experimental Psychology
Interviewer: Nick Yeung, University College

Q: Imagine that 100 people all put £1 into a pot for a prize that will go to the winner of a simple game. Each person has to choose a number between 0 and 100. The prize goes to the person whose number is closest to 2/3 of the average of all of the numbers chosen. What number will you choose, and why?

Nick: I like this as a question for experimental psychology because answering it brings in a range of skills relevant to the subject. Partly it involves numerical and analytical skills: the question implies that the answer will be 2/3 of some other number, but which one? Some people’s first guess is 2/3 of 100, i.e., 66 or 67, in which case I’d ask them what numbers everyone else would have to pick for them to win. In this case, everyone else would have to choose 100, which is unlikely. More often people first guess 2/3 of 50 (33), which seems intuitively more likely. At this point, and usually without prompting, the recursive nature of the solution becomes clear: If there is good reason for me to choose 33, then maybe everyone else will choose 33 too, in which case I should choose 2/3 of 33… but then everyone will think this and choose 2/3 of 33 too, so I should choose 2/3 of that number.. and so on. Assuming everyone thinks like this, then everyone will eventually settle on 0 as their choice – this is the formal ‘game theory’ solution. At this point, I’d ask questions that bring out the candidate’s broader reasoning skills in terms of thinking how we could define what it is rational to do in this game. Game theory gives one definition of rationality, but does it give a plausible winning answer – that is, is it likely that everyone, all 100 of them, will go through exactly the thought process we’ve just described? If not, is 0 really a rational answer? The question also has a psychological angle in thinking about reasons for people’s behaviour and choices: Will everyone put in the same effort? Will everyone be motivated to win? When I’ve used this question in live audiences, sometimes people say they’d pick the number 100 just because it’d throw a spanner in the works for everyone playing the game rationally. How should this affect your choice of answer? What if the stakes were increased so that everyone put £1000 into the pot at the start?
What’s clear from all of this is that we’re not looking for a single answer. Rather, we’re interested in seeing how people think through a problem, figure out what are the relevant factors, respond when new information is provided, and so on.

Subject: Engineering

Interviewer: Steve Collins, University College

Q: Place a 30cm ruler on top of one finger from each hand. What happens when you bring your fingers together?

Steve: This would never be the opening question in an interview – we usually start with a first question that gives the candidate an opportunity to get comfortable by discussing something familiar. We then ask more technical questions based on material in the GCSE and A-level syllabi. This question would come later in the interview, when we present candidates with an unfamiliar scenario and ask them to use what they know about familiar concepts (such as friction) to explain something.
Almost everyone in this example will expect the ruler to topple off the side where the finger is closest to the centre to the ruler because they expect this finger to reach the centre of the ruler first. They then complete the ‘experiment’ and find both fingers reach the centre of the ruler at the same time and the ruler remains balanced on two fingers. We like to see how candidates react to what is usually an unexpected result, and then encourage them to repeat the experiment slowly. This helps them observe that the ruler slides over each finger in turn, starting with the finger that is furthest from the centre. With prompting to consider moments and friction, the candidate will come to the conclusion that moments mean that there is a larger force on the finger that is closest to the centre of the ruler. This means that there is more friction between the ruler and this finger and therefore the rule slides over the finger furthest from the centre first. This argument will apply until the fingers are the same distance from the centre. The candidate should then be able to explain why both fingers reach the centre of the rule at the same time as observed. In some cases, particularly if we have not done a quantitative question already, we might then proceed with a quantitative analysis of forces and moments. We might even discuss the fact that the coefficient of static friction is higher than the coefficient of dynamic friction and therefore the ‘moving’ finger gets closer to the centre than the static finger before the finger starts to move over the other finger.

Subject: Oriental Studies
Interviewer: Alison Salvesen, Mansfield College

Q: Can archaeology ‘prove’ or ‘disprove’ the Bible?

Alison: Candidates in my subject come from a wide variety of backgrounds and qualifications, so we generally try to tailor the interview questions to the individual according to what they have on the UCAS form or wrote about in their submitted work, in order to find out whether they have a genuine interest in the subject area and an aptitude for the course.
For this particular question I would be looking for an answer that showed the candidate could appreciate that the Bible was a collection of documents written and transmitted over several centuries, and containing important traditions that have a bearing on history, but that academic study of the Bible means that it has to be examined carefully to see when and where these traditions had come from and for what purpose they had been written. Whereas they should recognise that archaeology relies on non-literary sources preserved from ancient periods such as the remains of buildings and tools. These can often be dated by scientific means (and so appear more objective than literature), but we still frequently need additional information such as inscriptions or evidence from other similar sites in order to make sense of the ancient remains. In the end I would hope the candidate would work towards a realisation of the very different nature of these types of evidence, which sometimes gives a complementary picture, while in others it may be contradictory. Both require very careful interpretation, and just arguing that ‘The Bible says’ or that ‘Archaeology proves’ is much too simplistic. (The same kind of thing applies to archaeology, the Quran, and non-Islamic historical sources for a study of the early Arab conquests.)

Why study French?

100 Good Reasons to Study Modern Languages at University: Reason 93

October 7, 2015 simonrkemp Leave a comment

NIAMEY, NIGER - AUGUST 12: Nigerois boys play a game of soccer on August 12, 2005 Niamey, Nigeria. Niamey is the Capital of Niger. Niger is experiencing a food crisis which is threatening the lives of thousands in the impoverished West African nation. A combination of sever drought and a locust plague has caused the famine which has affected at least 2 million people in Niger and approximatly 5 million in the region. Niger is the second poorest country in the world, with 64 percent of the 12 millions inhabitants surviving on less than USD1 (81 euro cents) day. (Photo by Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images) — i

French is a growing language. There are currently 220 million French speakers in the world. By the year 2060, there may be 760 million.

A recent study that claimed French would be the world’s most widely spoken language by 2050, overtaking Spanish, English and Mandarin, may have been a bit over-optimistic. Nevertheless, the number of French speakers around the world is growing sharply, especially in francophone Africa. As L’Express discussed in a recent article, population growth and increasing levels of education in Africa are an important factor in the growth of the language in countries where it is the official language, as well of countries where it plays a mediating role between several local languages, or serves as the language of administration, business and the media.

According to the Observatoire de la langue française, there are likely to be 715 million French speakers in the world in 2050, which is 8% of the expected global population of nine billion. This is then forecast to increase to 760 million francophones by 2060. This may well cause it to creep up the rankings of global languages from its current fourth place, behind English, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese.

The centre of gravity of the French language is also shifting southwards. In 2050, 85% of French speakers will be in Africa. That figure rises to 90% of young people aged 15-29, given the starkly different demographics of the European and African continents.

The future is definitely francophone, even if it’s not necessarily French.

French language

Wesh is the word

September 30, 2015 simonrkemp 1 Comment

The Economist has been looking at how Arabic words find their way into French, particularly French street slang, through the communities of North African origin. We’ll take a proper look at the links of language and culture between France and the countries of the Maghreb (a region including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, and perhaps Mauritania and the disputed Western Sahara) in posts to come. For now, though, here are a few tips you may find useful if you want to hang out with the French cool kids:

WITH a bright “Wesh meuf!” a French teenager hails a friend in slang that would appal linguistic purists. It is the sort of counter-cultural vernacular usually heard on the concrete estates of the outer-city banlieues, where French youngsters of Arab and African descent have long devised an alternative lexicon. But this greeting comes from a white middle-class girl in a posh high school near Paris. Is mainstream French, whose guardians have traditionally fought contamination, embracing more playful disruption than the purists like to think?

The word wesh, from Wach rak? (How are you?) in an Algerian dialect of Arabic, has crossed into mainstream youth culture in all but the snootiest corners of urban France. Meufis a common word in verlan, the French backwards slang that spread in the banlieues in the 1970s and 1980s and which inverts syllables: it upends femme, French for woman. Plenty of other banlieue terms based on Arabic have edged towards the mainstream too, often via rap music, hip-hop or cinema, such as kiffer (to like or love, from kif, the Arabic word for cannabis). This word features in the title of a French novel, “Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow”, by Faïza Guène. The French embassy even ran a cultural festival in New York entitled “I kiffe NY”.

Some words have become so firmly established in mainstream French (avoir la baraka, or to be lucky, from the Arabic for benediction) that they are considered passé by today’s youth. More contemporary street slang includes avoir le seum (to be annoyed, from the Arabic for poison). Other terms have yet to cross over from the banlieue, their incomprehensibility part of their angry charm.

Until recently, occasional official appropriations of street slang did not imply real linguistic openness. France maintains strict rules limiting the use of foreign words in advertising, packaging or songs on the radio. In 2013 language inspectors investigated 8,475 cases of linguistic rule-breaking. The Académie Française sees English as the “real menace”, and suggests handy alternative French vocabulary for new offenders, such as mot-dièse for hashtag.

Yet to mark French language week earlier this year, Fleur Pellerin, the (South Korean-born) culture minister, gave an important speech in which she applauded “the capacity of our French language to welcome new or foreign words”. Quoting Victor Hugo, she said that French was “not fixed” and that importing and innovating was a source of enrichment. The country’s grand dictionaries now accept some English words, such as le selfie, and some Arabic ones, such as caïd (gang leader). The 2014 edition of “Le Petit Robert” listed chelou, verlan for louche (weird).

In reality, French has borrowed Arabic words such as “algebra” and “tariff” since the Middle Ages, and incorporated others, such as bled (village), from the period of French rule in Algeria in 1830-1962. Bred by defiance, street slang by nature resists any stamp of approval, and mutates in response. Since verlan was partly devised as a verbal rebellion against French as the language of colonisation, though, there is something fitting about the ex-coloniser’s language at last embracing the creative result of that revolt.

And while we’re on the subject, if you’d like to test your knowledge of up-to-the-minute French slang, Libération has a handy multiple choice quiz you can try, entitled, Wesh, vieux, tu parles le jeune? Follow the link to have a go.

French language, French life

Great French Lives: Etienne de Silhouette

September 23, 2015 simonrkemp Leave a comment

posted by Simon Kemp

A while back, we learned that Joseph-Ignace de Guillotin did not invent the guillotine. Today it’s time to discover that Etienne de Silhouette didn’t invent the silhouette, either.

The story is quite a mysterious one, in fact. The word silhouette, in French and English, originally referred to cut-out profile portraits in black paper, resembling a shadow of the sitter. Like this one, for instance:

If you go to the Place du Tertre in the Montmartre district of Paris, you’ll probably still get someone try to persuade you to get one of yourself.

The portraits, and the word ‘silhouette’, originated in the eighteenth century. It’s known that the word is derived from the name of Louis XV’s finance minister, Etienne de Silhouette, but it’s not exactly clear why.

Etienne de Silhouette was born in Limoges in 1709. He was to rise to the rank of contrôleur général des finances at the court of King Louis by the age of fifty, thanks to the patronage of the King’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour. He was appointed to the post in March 1759, but didn’t even make it to the end of the year. Attempting to get state finances into better shape, he advocated cutting spending, getting rid of loopholes that allowed rich state officials to avoid paying tax, and imposing a touch of austerity on the lavish spending of the royal court. This last proposal in particular didn’t go down too well, and he was booted out of office in November of that year, retiring from public life to live on his country estate for the rest of his days.

Silhouette’s attempted reforms led his enemies to call him a skinflint, and his name was soon associated with meanness and frugality. Apparently, breeches without money-pockets were known as ‘culottes à la Silhouette’ at the time. It’s been claimed that this is the reason Silhouette gave his name to the shadow-portraits, either because they were a ‘portrait-on-the-cheap’, or because they thinned people down to a shadow of themselves. That may just be part of the general slander Silhouette suffered after his short-lived stint in control of the nation’s purse strings. Other accounts suggest he was a genuine enthusiast for shadow-portraits, and would sit guests to his home in front of a blank canvas, before using a special lamp to project their shadow onto it for him to draw around.

Either way, whether he was an enthusiast for the craft or a victim of some very roundabout insult, it’s unlikely that Silhouette was the inventor of the technique. For starters, shadow puppets have been in use in south-east Asia for at least a thousand years, and it’s known that these ‘ombres chinoises’ reached Europe at around the time we’re talking about, where they became generally popular. As with Guillotin, it seems, the famous name gets the credit, and the real inventor, whoever they may have been, is lost in the shadows.

Film

Bookshelf Film Club: French TV with English Subtitles

September 16, 2015 simonrkemp 1 Comment

posted by Simon Kemp

It wasn’t Scandi-noir that brought foreign-language drama to British TV and helped the Great British Public finally overcome their subtitle-phobia. When the BBC first showed the all-conquering Danish drama The Killing in 2011, they screened it in the Saturday evening BBC 4 slot that was already home to cult French police drama, Spiral, which was arguably the real ground-breaker in bringing foreign TV to UK audiences. Where they started, others followed, and now, along with five seasons of Spiral, there have been at least three other French dramas fitted up with English subtitles and broadcast over here.

What’s more, they’ve all been successful enough to get released as DVD and Blu-ray box-sets, as well as being available on various streaming services. If you can cope with French TV without subtitles, then there’s obviously masses of material out there to choose from. (The long-running sit-com, Fais pas ci, fais pas ça, or the sweeping saga of German Occupation, Un village français, are two that are worth a look). But if English subtitles are what you need, then Spiral, Braquo, The Returned and Witnesses are here for your enjoyment.

The four series all tend to specialize in the gritty and/or terrifying. They’re all most definitely post-watershed, and not for the faint-hearted, as you can tell from the trailers below.

Spiral (the French title is Engrenages, which means cogs or gears, but also has the sense of being caught in a trap or a vicious circle) follows a single case through each season, as Laure Berthaud and her team hunt murderers, terrorists and organized criminals, while unscrupulous lawyers and judges play power games above their heads. The first five seasons are available on DVD, and Season Six is currently in production.

https://youtu.be/BoLvBmdnyaE

Braquo is another police drama with murky moral boundaries and some shocking violence. Four police officers will stop at nothing to clear the name of their colleague, hounded to suicide by false accusations. Three seasons of it were shown on Sky.

Probably the biggest TV phenomenon, though, was The Returned (Les Revenants), the supremely spooky supernatural drama shown by Channel 4 last year. In an isolated Alpine town, loved ones start returning to their families. They’re in good shape, ravenously hungry, and feeling more or less fine, if suffering from a bit of memory trouble. The only problem is, they’re dead. Even the trailer is terrifying — watch it if you dare!

And most recently, there has been Witnesses (Les Témoins), another detective drama, but with more of the otherworldly creepiness of The Returned than the gritty urban feel of Spiral and Braquo. Someone is grave-robbing in the little Normandy town of Le Tréport, and breaking into new-build show-homes to arrange the bodies in grisly parodies of family life. There’s also an escaped killer on the run from a nearby prison, and it all has something to do with the detective who caught him, whose photo is left at one of the show-homes. It was a hit on British TV last month, is due out on DVD in October.

We’ll talk about each of them in more detail in future posts. In the meantime, with French TV drama in something of a golden age, there’s no better time to get stuck in.

PS. And now there’s another one! Resistance, a TF1 drama about teenagers involved in the French Resistance during the Second World War Occupation by Nazi Germany, is currently showing on More 4, and available online here.

French language, French life

The View from the Other End of the Tunnel

September 9, 2015 simonrkemp Leave a comment

posted by Simon Kemp

It’s always interesting to see how news in your country gets reported abroad, and it’s particularly interesting when France and Britain are both reporting on a story that concerns both of us. The refugee and migrant crisis at the Eurotunnel in Calais is one such story. It’s had a lot of coverage over here and a fair amount in France too, although the French reports have a rather different tone to them. Slate.fr recently published an article on the whole affair. You can find it here. (Watch out, though! They’ve given it a rather, erm, eye-catching headline in English…) After some remarks on British attitudes to the tunnel, and to foreigners in general, the author gets on to the current situation. Here’s an extract, with some of the trickier vocabulary picked out in bold and listed under each paragraph:

(UPDATE: The article pre-dates the death of Aylan Kurdi, the photos of whom on a Turkish beach have so dramatically changed the debate in recent days. Here is another French article on Calais published since.)

Chaque semaine, des milliers de migrants tentent de traverser la Manche par le tunnel qui a fini par être ouvert en 1994. Ces aspirants voyageurs sautent par-dessus les tourniquets—ou, plus précisément, franchissent les immenses grillages proches de l’entrée du tunnel aux environs de Calais, en France. Dans des scènes dignes du pire cauchemar de John Bull, réfugiés, demandeurs d’asile et migrants économiques essaient désespérément de sauter à bord de camions à destination de la Grande-Bretagne et, espèrent-ils, d’une vie meilleure (en clients avertis, les migrants savent que la vie, en tout cas lorsqu’elle est évaluée en termes d’emploi et de statistiques économiques, est plus douce dans le pays de Shakespeare que dans celui de Racine).

sauter par-dessus les tourniquets: jump the barriers

digne de: worthy of

le pire cauchemar: worst nightmare

le demandeur d’asile: asylum seeker

le client averti: smart customer

Comme il était à prévoir, les événements de Calais ont déclenché les mêmes peurs incontrôlées et le même langage désinhibé qui bardait les premiers débats britanniques autour du tunnel. Fin juillet, dans un article orné de photos de gendarmes français échouant à regrouper des migrants ou se contentant de les regarder courir sous leur nez, le Sun a braillé «Les Frenchies sont atroces!» Pour ne pas être en reste, le Daily Mail a claironné que le cri de ralliement des migrants était: «C’est l’Angleterre ou la mort», et le journal en a profité pour exiger de savoir quand le Premier ministre David Cameron entendait «agir». Les tabloïds, jouant sur les souvenirs de 1940, ont raillé la lâcheté de la réaction française devant la vague de migrants tentant d’entrer dans le tunnel et appelé le gouvernement britannique à faire intervenir l’armée.

Comme il était à prévoir: As might have been expected

déclencher: trigger, set off

désinhibé: uninhibited

échouer à faire qq ch: fail to do something

Pour ne pas être en reste: So as not to be left out

entendre faire: intend to do

railler: mock

Cameron n’a pas encore mobilisé l’armée mais en revanche il n’a pas manqué de faire appel à ses réserves rhétoriques. Lors d’une visite officielle au Vietnam, il a utilisé le mot«nuées» pour décrire les milliers de migrants désespérés qui tentent de forcer le passage dans le tunnel. Plus souvent utilisé pour qualifier des insectes que des êtres humains, ce mot a probablement eu plus de succès auprès des lecteurs du Mail que d’organismes comme la filiale britannique de Médecins du Monde, dont le directeur a observé que ce que Cameron appelait des «nuées» était en réalité «des gens ordinaires—des mères, des pères, des filles et des fils—qui vivaient dans les conditions les plus atroces qui soient et que personne ne devrait avoir à supporter.»

en revanche: on the other hand

faire appel à: call up, call upon (i.e. Cameron isn’t mobilizing the army, but he’s calling up his reserves of rhetoric)

la nuée: swarm

un organisme: (here) organization

la filiale: branch

les plus atroces qui soient: the worst possible (literally, ‘the most atrocious that might be)

Se déclarant «très préoccupé» par la situation à Calais et plus particulièrement par les kilomètres de camions attendant sur les autoroutes anglaises de pouvoir entrer dans le tunnel, poussé à la fois par les problèmes de sécurité qui se posent dans le tunnel et par les équipes en grèves dans les ferries français, Cameron semblait également soucieux de la réaction de la France. Il a tapé sur les doigts des Français, évoqué les sommes—plus de 4,7 millions d’euros— déjà dépensées par son gouvernement pour renforcer le réseau de sécurité autour de l’entrée du tunnel côté français, et promis d’affecter 10 millions d’euros supplémentaires à la sécurité du tunnel.

en grève: on strike

soucieux de: concerned about

taper sur les doigts de qqn: rap someone on the knuckles

le réseau de sécurité: security cordon

affecter: (here) allocate

Why study French?

Subtitling Geordie Shore

September 2, 2015 simonrkemp Leave a comment

What’s it like to be fluent in more than one language?

What language do bilingual people dream in?

Are they more emotional in their one language? More rational in another?

Never mind those questions. How about these:

How does stand-up comedy work in India, when performers and audience members may speak English, Hindi, Tamil, Urdu or several other languages, and not necessarily the same ones?

And most importantly, what’s it like to be employed to watch entire seasons of MTV reality show Geordie Shore, translate all the dialogue into your native language, and then try to boil it down into coherent subtitles?

Yes, Geordie-Shore-Subtitler is a real job, that actual people are doing across Europe right now at this very minute. Would you like to meet one of them? And would you like to find out how “I should have a degree in pulling women” comes out in German subtitles?

Of course you would.

Well, all these questions are answered here. It’s an episode of the BBC Radio Show, Fry’s English Delight called English Plus One, in which Stephen Fry looks at bilingualism, and talks to people who combine English with another language. He finds out what it’s like to live in two languages at the same time, and also why it might be a good idea to pick up a second language and become bilingual yourself.

The programme is thirty minutes long and available to listen to (in the UK at least) until the end of September. Geordie Shore in German is around twenty minutes in.

Summer Reading: Dora Bruder

August 26, 2015 simonrkemp 1 Comment

As promised, a reading recommendation from the works of France’s newest Nobel laureate. Unusually for Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder(1997) is actually non-fiction, but it reads so much like his novels that many of its early readers thought it was one.

The story begins when Modiano comes across a brief article in an old French newspaper, dated 31 December 1941, at which point France was under Nazi Occupation. The article was a plea for information about a missing girl, with a description of her appearance and the clothes she was last seen wearing. Here it is:

PARIS
ON RECHERCHE une jeune fille, Dora Bruder, 15 ans, 1 m. 55, visage ovale, yeux gris marron, manteau sport gris, pull-over bordeaux, jupe et chapeau bleu marine, chaussures sport marron. Adresser toutes indications à M. et Mme Bruder, 41 boulevard Ornano, Paris.

PARIS. A young girl, Dora Bruder, is missing, 15 years old, 1 m. 55, oval face, grey-brown eyes, grey sports coat, dark red jumper, navy blue skirt and hat, brown sports shoes. Any information to M. and Mme Bruder, 41 Boulevard Ornano, Paris.

For some of Modiano’s readers, this petite annonce was already familiar, since it had appeared in an earlier novel of his, with no indication at that point that it was a genuine newspaper article. As Modiano explains in Dora Bruder:

Je n’ai cessé d’y penser durant des mois et des mois. (…) Il me semblait que je ne parviendrais jamais à retrouver la moindre trace de Dora Bruder. Alors le manque que j’éprouvais m’a poussé à l’écriture d’un roman, Voyage de noces.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it for months and months. (…) I felt that I would never manage to find the slightest trace of Dora Bruder. So the lack that I was feeling pushed me into writing a novel, Honeymoon.

In returning to Dora’s story in non-fiction, Modiano isn’t simply writing her biography. Indeed, the story of the troubled Jewish girl who runs away from home, returns, and some months later is arrested, interned in Paris, and finally sent to her death in a concentration camp, has left so little mark on history that Modiano struggles to find the barest details of who she was and what she experienced.

Rather, he gives us the story of his investigation, exploring archives for mentions of her name, revisiting the places she lived to absorb their atmosphere. In the course of his research, he discovers police reports on the arrests of French Jews, desperate pleas in letters from the relatives of those taken, and letters home from the internment camps on the eve of deportation. Many of these find their way into Modiano’s book verbatim, so that at some points Modiano’s own account fades behind a collage of documents from the Occupation. And intertwined with these strands of Dora’s story, the story of Modiano’s research, and the fragments of other stories of those caught up in the Holocaust, comes one further narrative strand, which is Modiano’s own story, and the roots of his obsession in his own troubled family background. Modiano’s father, we learn, was a Jewish man who survived the Holocaust through his close association with a band of collaborationist thugs, the Rue Lauriston Gang, who at one point intercede after he has been arrested to save him from deportation to the death camps. This difficult legacy of a father who was both Jew and collaborator, victim and accomplice in the Holocaust, lies at the root of all Modiano’s writing, but rarely as clearly shown as here.

Like all Modiano’s books, Dora Bruder is short, written in simple, accessible French, and a very powerful piece of writing.You’ll find no better introduction to France’s années noires, and the uneasy memories of those years in contemporary French society. Here, to finish, is a short extract from the book, in which Modiano visits the military barracks where Dora was held with other Jewish people, before being sent to Drancy, and thence to Auschwitz:

Le boulevard était désert, ce dimanche-là, et perdu dans un silence si profond que j’entendais le bruissement des platanes. Un haut mur entoure l’ancienne caserne des Tourelles et cache les bâtiments de celle-ci. J’ai longé ce mur. Une plaque y est fixée sur laquelle j’ai lu :

ZONE MILITAIRE

DÉFENSE DE FILMER

OU DE PHOTOGRAPHIER

Je me suis dit que plus personne ne se souvenait de rien. Derrière le mur s’étendait un no man’s land, une zone de vide et d’oubli. Les vieux bâtiments des Tourelles n’avaient pas été détruits comme le pensionnat de la rue de Picpus, mais cela revenait au même.

Et pourtant, sous cette couche épaisse d’amnésie, on sentait bien quelque chose, de temps en temps, un écho lointain, étouffé, mais on aurait été incapable de dire quoi, précisément. C’était comme de se trouver au bord d’un champ magnétique, sans pendule pour en capter les ondes. Dans le doute et la mauvaise conscience, on avait affiché l’écriteau « Zone militaire. Défense de filmer ou de photographier ».

The boulevard was deserted that Sunday, and lost in such deep silence that I could hear the rustle of the plane trees. There is a high wall around the former Tourelles barracks which hides its buildings. I walked along this wall. There’s a sign on it, on which I read:

MILITARY ZONE

NO FILMING OR PHOTOGRAPHY

I said to myself that nobody remembers anything any more. Behind the wall stretched out a no-man’s-land, a zone of emptiness and oblivion. The old buildings of Tourelles hadn’t been destroyed like [Dora’s] boarding school in the Rue de Picpus, but it came down to the same thing.

But under this thick layer of amnesia you could still feel something now and then, a distant, stifled echo, although you couldn’t say what exactly. It was like being on the edge of a magnetic field, without a pendulum to capture its waves. In doubt and troubled conscience, they had put up the sign: “Military Zone. No Filming or Photography.”

Dora Bruder is available in French, as a paperback or e-book, or inEnglish translation.

Summer Reading: Un coeur simple

August 19, 2015 simonrkemp Leave a comment

posted by Simon Kemp

Is it time for a classic? After a couple of recommendations of recent novels, I think it’s time we had a go at one of the great masters of French literature, Gustave Flaubert.

The French novel, like the English one, had a real golden age in the nineteenth century, when writers like Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Émile Zola, and Flaubert wrote novels of sweeping social panoramas and vivid details of everyday life which have come to be known as French Realism. There are many masterpieces among them, including Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir and Zola’s Germinal, but at many hundreds of pages, they can be a daunting prospect, particularly if, as a learner of French, you’re tempted to tackle these authors in the original language. We’ll come back to them some other time, but for now, I’d like to recommend a more modest way in to discover Realist literature: Flaubert’s short story, Un cœur simple (A Simple Heart).

Flaubert said he wanted to write ‘un livre sur rien’ (‘a book about nothing’), and in Un cœur simple he’s not far off. Félicité is a poor and uneducated woman in rural France, who, after disappointment in love, takes up service in a middle-class household.

She is loyal to her widowed mistress and devoted to the children of the house. Her life has small pleasures and larger sorrows; she is generous with her kindness, which is not often repaid. In later life, her dearest love is a parrot.

Later still, her dearest love is a deceased parrot, stuffed and mounted on a perch.

Then, a gang of international art thieves mount an operation to steal the parrot, which they mistakenly believe to be an ancient Maltese statuette of inestimable value.

(Actually, not that last one.)

The story is funny, sweet and sad, and has the most beautiful ending. If you’d like a little introduction to the world of the Realist novel, and are prepared to consider that there might be more ways to write a great story than dramatic incident, extraordinary people or complex plotting, then you should give it a try.

You can get it as a single volume, as one of Flaubert’s Trois contescollected together, or, of course, in English translation. If you like it, there are two places to go from here. One is Julian Barnes’s brilliantFlaubert’s Parrot, the tale of a Flaubert obsessive’s attempt to track down the actual stuffed parrot Flaubert used for inspiration while writing Un cœur simple.

The other, of course, is Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, most famous of all nineteenth-century French novels, where the same setting of humdrum small-town life in northern France is the backdrop to a rather more eventful life story, as the young heroine’s dreams of romance, passion and high-society glamour cannot be reconciled with her apparent fate as the wife of a country doctor whose only aspiration is a pair of slippers by the fireside.

Summer Reading: Un secret

August 12, 2015 simonrkemp Leave a comment

posted by Simon Kemp

If you’re looking to read a novel in French that’s fairly short and accessible, but a serious piece of literature that will stay with you long after you finish it, then Philippe Grimbert’s Un secret would be a good choice. It won the Prix Goncourt des lycéens when it was published (France’s only literary prize to be awarded by a panel of sixth-formers), and has since been made into a film by Claude Miller.

The autobiographical novel is about the terrible family secret Philippe uncovers during his childhood. The story begins with his unusual quirk, as a child, of having not an imaginary friend, but an imaginary brother:

Fils unique, j’ai longtemps eu un frère. Il fallait me croire sur parole quand je servais cette fable à mes relations de vacances, à mes amis de passage. J’avais un frère. Plus beau, plus fort. Un frère aîné glorieux, invisible.

[An only child, for a long time I had a brother. You had to take my word for it when I served up this tale to people I met on holiday or casual acquaintances. I had a brother. Stronger, more handsome. A glorious, invisible older brother.]

But not only does Philippe have an imaginary brother, he also knows the brother’s name, Simon, and owns the cuddly toy dog that once belonged to him. Simon, it begins to appear, is not so imaginary after all, but pieced together from half-remembered whispers and silences about Philippe’s parents’ lives before he was born. And the mystery seems somehow connected to the fact that their real name isn’t Grimbert at all, but the Jewish surname, Grinberg. What Philippe finally discovers is a history of love and betrayal among his parents and their circle of friends during the German Occupation of France in World War II, culminating in a dramatic event, the ‘secret’ itself, which, once you learn it, you won’t forget for a long time.

A blog for students and teachers of Years 11 to 13, and anyone else with an interest in Modern Foreign Languages and Cultures, written by the staff and students of Oxford University. Updated every Wednesday!