The French state subsidizes cafeterias in both universities and high schools and it is pretty great to think you can eat for about a third of what it would cost to buy your way into an American cafeteria - take a certain Leo J. O'Donovan, SJ Dining Hall, for example. That said, a can of Diet Coke alone costs about a dollar forty ... you win some, you lose some.
The cafes have almost won back my affection, however with things like their abortion-advertising napkins. No matter your beliefs, is this really mealtime conversation? And their fantastic foods. Like the "coleSLOW" salad I had the other day. This might acutally be more effectively evocative of the semi-ruralized Americana that loves it some coleslaw (yr faithful correspondent included, obviously)than its less hackneyed spelling.
By far the best mistranslation I have yet to encounter, however, is probably more accurately put, a case of overtranslation. Sciences Po Lyon hosted a post finals part at a bar/billiards hall called Road 66 ... it is rather as though no one ever stopped to think that mayyybe all of the acutal road signs they decorated with hadn't been specially translated for french audiences to read "Route 66" (Route=Road in French. I guess that's semi-important for comprehension).
All of this makes me just a little nervous about the translation of things that really matter. I'm just about done with Ernest Hemmingway's A Moveable Feast ... which is way less pretentious than it sounds as it is a very easy if lovely book to read. But it is just precisely Hemmingway's quality of concision, of well-turned simplicity, which makes me wonder if it would really be possible to translate Hemmingway as, well, Hemmingway, and not just an approximation of the anecdotes he relates in to French. The French language has a significantly restricted scope when compared to English, which it sees as rather word-bloated; this, however, only serves to makes things more complex as many things lack a mot juste and must be explained at greater length - death to the accurate author. (EDIT: because clearly these last two sentences were paradigms of terseness.) I think I might do well to just end here rather than continue to be tempted by remarks on French ineffeciency on the whole.p.s. Super-attractive pic of Coppola and co. What up, Scarlett Johanssen?
