Friday French Lesson

Have you ever bought a job-lot of cards for just one card? I have. Dan put a little pile of cards up for sale on the UK Facebook group at a fair price and I spotted two Tony Gwynn cards in it. They were both fairly common cards that, no, wait a minute, that's an O-Pee-Chee card!

Card Number 673: O-Pee-Chee, 1986; #10

Apart from the O-Pee-Chee logo in a big white box on the front, there isn't really anything to distinguish it from the Topps card of the same year.

But when you turn it over, there's a lot of differences because most of the content is replicated in French.

"Parlons Baseball!"

"Premier coup de circuit!"

"Fiche complete comme frappeur dans les Majeures!"

I had an interesting discussion in work a couple of days ago about trying to produce genuinely bilingual resources and one thing we talked about was how pedestrian translated material becomes. The same thing happens on card backs. In English Tony "belted" his first major league home run on August 22nd 1982. The French just notes his first home run was on the 22nd August 1982. (Also, how weird is it that in French they put the dates the correct way round, instead of putting them the American way!)

This cardback is from the era where an unrelated factoid makes its appearance on the back as well. I noticed the French text is about 25 percent longer than the English. We have exactly the same issue in work when we have resources translated into Welsh. English is a language that is very easy to pare down and convey meaning with minimal words and grammar. Languages like French and Welsh have less forgiving syntax and are more precise. 

By the way, that premier coup de circuit was against the Chicago Cubs in an 8-7 defeat for the Padres at Wrigley Field. Tony hit it off Bill Campbell in the sixth inning. It was a solo home run, but Tony had already hit a triple in the second inning, batting in a run.

A big thanks to Dan for making this post possible.

Total: 673 cards