Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Internship Post #6


First off, it is important to  mention that my internship was changed from Tyndale Saint-George’s Community Center to LaSalle’s Multicultural Ressource Center. I do translation work for them, I translate English documents and letter in French and vice-versa.

When it comes to listening comprehension, I can safely say that it was always easy for me to understand the people I worked with. Whether it was with the kids at Tyndale or one of my supervisor, there was never any real misunderstanding when it came to listening and when there was something I did not quite understand, I would ask questions about it right away. I cannot clearly state that I understand the people I work with better than in the beginning because I worked at two different places.

As for my accent, I don’t think it changed very much since my new stage are mostly in written form. I know my english accent still has room to improve, but it is not a problem. On the other hand, I noticed that my host at LMRC pronounces french terms with an anglophone accent, like names of streets. Example : “Rue Lapierre” pronounced “pir” rather than “piɛr” like in this example, she doesn’t do the diphthong i->iɛ.

When it comes to talk about my fluency it’s a bit weird because I considered myself fluent before my internship. I think I am more fluent in English because of the new vocabulary I learned, I am more aware of the meaning of certain specific words in specific context like the word “Board” can be a synonym of “Council” and it doesn’t mean board like a chalk board.

Funny how I have nothing to say about humor, my internship is serious work.

My personnal goals with the internship were always to improve all aspect of how I speak english. I try to use as many different words as possible to become familiar with them and remember in which context they are best suited for. Since I am already fluent in English, I focused more on language accuracy. Also since my task was to translate written documents, conserving the meaning in each sentence was more important. I noticed when translating documents from English to French that most of the time in French you need more words to express the same idea. Example : My friend’s cat, Le chat de mon ami.
Not example from my internship, but you get the picture


New words, expressions, structures
1-      Board : Group of executives, council                                   (while translating a document)
2-      Counselling : Therapy, help, assistance                                (while translating a document)
3-      It’s completely normal to say “Open the TV” according to my supervisor.
4-      Senior: Means Séniors in French but is never used in French, we say personnes âgées
5-      Months don’t need a capital letter at the beginning in French. January->janvier

No comments:

Post a Comment