The OC episode 404
I know I’m roughly 3 years late to this party, but all I have to say about this episode is thank goodness for actual French people. After the infamous (in my mind) Dollhouse French incident, I’m now eternally grateful for any properly-rendered foreign language on an American TV show.
The dude who played the lawyer is definitely French and spoke honest-to-God fast-speech registre soutenu French, like an actual French lawyer would speak. Autumn Reeser is definitely not French, but she tried so darn hard and got pretty close (while speaking pretty fast and, commendably, continuing to act) so that didn’t upset me unduly. Her intonation of Comment le savez-vous? “How do you know?” is totally wrong* but that’s the worst criticism I have, and it’s mild and understandable.
The translations that appeared in subtitle were good. The only complaint I have is minor, which is that the translation of the lawyer’s line Je vous préviens, je me suis entraîné de ne pas réagir aux larmes misses the funny turn of phrase. It’s translated as “I warn you, I am impervious to tears”. Yes that’s what it means, but what it actually says is “I warn you, I have trained myself not to react to tears”. I don’t see why they couldn’t have subtitled it with that. The English line as it is gets a laugh; why not just keep the funnier literal meaning of the French?
Anyway, this is just another in way in which Josh Schwartz continues to improve the world. Vive la langue française.
And in a frigging awesome coincidence, this is my 404th post.
* Her intonation is flat and low for the first two words, then falling through the last two words, whereas it should be rising through the first word, then flat and high for the rest. This is a pretty difficult thing to translate, actually. And as I will demonstrate, the French phrasing conveys what the English stress pattern should be, and thus some additional meaning. Looking at the English, there are two stress patterns that make sense: “you” stressed or “know” stressed. Which word is stressed determines where the uncertainty is. But in French, you’d determine where the uncertainty is by different phrasing, and not all intonation patterns are correct for a given phrasing. If the “you” were stressed in English, I’d say Comment est-ce que vous le sache? (intonation the same as for the English sentence “how is it that you know?”) and if the “know” were stressed in English, I’d say what was actually said in the show, with the intonation I gave at the beginning of this ridiculously long and pedantic footnote.
