Franglais

It’s crunch time at the Project Keneya Ciwara II office. We've dedicated the entirety of last week to our annual consortium meeting, the local participating consortium being made up of us at JHU/CCP, plus Care Mali, Groupe Pivot, and IntraHealth. There’s been all kinds of stress trying to figure out, in a room of 20+ representatives from all of these different organizations, how far we’ve come in year two of our project, and how far we can go in year three. We’ve been following up with our “plan d’action de l’année deux”/plan of action for year two and are drafting the same thing for “l’année trois.”

With all of the stress of the decision making, number crunching, and activity creating, there's also confusion. All kinds of snicker-inducing language confusion occurs on both sides of the language barrier -- mostly due to the fact that my francophone/french-speaking colleagues must write their project work plans, budgets, and final reports in English.

Each organization within the consortium brings their list of activities and budgets already written in their version of "English," and together we spend the majority of our time deciding which activities we think we can complete, which activities take priority, and how to harmonize all of these activities together. The harmonization process is done by having each organization present its ideas and documents via computer connected to a giant projector.

The projector makes French to English mistakes all too visible for these detail-focused public health programmers.

The easiest way to slip up has been with acronyms. In the international development field, there are a’plenty. We partner with “les ONGs” for “la distribution de SRO” en francais, whereas in English it’s the NGOs with which we're partnering to distribute the ORS (non-governmental organizations that distribute oral-rehydration salts for diarrhea). We hand out condoms to prevent les ISTs et le VIH/SIDA en francais, but in English we’re preventing STIs and HIV/AIDS. With our women’s groups, we want to promote le PF et les CPNs, but translated, that’s FP for family planning and PNC for prenatal consultations.

Even a Boggle expert like myself, who happens to be super-skilled at letter rearrangement, gets turned around with all of these mixed up and sometimes palindromic acronym translations.

Other problems occur with vocabulary, large and small. One debate over “investissements on” versus “investissements to” lasted for a whole 10 minutes, despite my efforts to explain from the beginning that it was “inVESTMENTS in.” Another heated discussion was in deciding whether to say they would print “brochures” or “roadmaps” (?) as visual aids for the community health workers, which are referred to as “relais.” These “relais” were then continuously called “relays” in the reports. Apparently that’s how these community health workers have been described in the reports for the last two years, so who am I to come in and say, “hey, relays are for runners, not healers!”?

The relai-relay predicament is what in French is referred to as a set of "faux-amis"/"false" or "fake-friends" which means that while they sound the same, these words actually have completely different meanings in their respective languages.

Another example would be the verb “forme” which means to teach or train rather than to actually form something. Together, a “formation de relais” translated to “formation of relays” is all wrong and something that I decided to fight to change. I mean come on, we’re doing public health work over here, not putting on a track meet!

After I fought tooth and nail to change the phrase to “training of community health workers,” the group continued with the sentence, “...with will be supervised by the ASACO health workers.” Thankfully, someone else stepped in. Our chief of party interjected, “WHICH, WHICH will be...” He spelled it out for the person manning the projector, then said, “Faites attentions! Si tu ajoutes un ‘t’ avant le ‘c,’ tu va écrire une sorcière americaine!”/“Be careful! If you add a ‘t’ in front of the ‘c,’ you’ll spell out the American whitch!" and then he went in for a high five. While I may have fought an English vocabulary battle, I wasn’t going to get into spelling, not with our big chief of party at least.

By the end of the week, everyone was exhausted from staring at the projector, especially while fasting for Ramadan. We were ready to just put these action plans into action...at which point I was given the stage.

Before closing out our meeting, I wanted to introduce the idea of a newsletter to the consortium, being that we had everyone pivotal to the project together for the first time since I’d been at the office.

The chief of party gave me the go-ahead, so I stood up and gave what I thought was a pretty nice twist of words to poetically get my point across: "Cette semaine, on a discuté comment améliorer notre collecte de données. Cependant, c’est aussi important d’améliorer notre collecte d’histoires, pour suivre nos progrès avec PKCII."/"This week, we’ve discussed how to better our data collection. However, it’s also important to better our story collection to keep track of our progress with Project Keneya Ciwara II." I was trying to use a little wordplay to get the point across that we need to start documenting our successes in the field to send to the states, and therefore keep our donors happy.

Feeling really proud of myself, I handed out our first finished newsletter and asked if there were any questions.

No one raised a hand.

The chief of party stood up and said, "Nous savons tous que notre collègue Americaine est nouvelle avec le francais. Permettez-moi de traduire son ‘franglais.’"/'We all know that our American colleague is new to French. Please allow me to translate her ‘franglais.’"

The chief of party, who I had saved from a public spelling lesson on “witch,” had given my delivery of French the title “franglais,” a mix of "francais/anglais" -- what you anglophones may call "Frenglish." He gave me the stage then threw the first tomato!

Just like that, I was no longer a tubabou. The only white girl sitting in the room turned bright red when all of these Malian public health head honchos started cracking up. I was about ready to give him a real lesson on another word that ended in -itch, even if he was the chief of party.

Fortunately for both of us, after he described my newsletter idea in “proper” francais, the crowd seemed open and encouraging to the newsletter idea. While my face stopped flushing and I returned to my complacent tubabou status, I am now keenly aware that our chief of party, although very knowledgable and generous, can be another kind of faux-ami.