Elinor Davies (RPS 2005–18) on her publishing internship in Paris
Elinor Davies left Rydal Penrhos in 2018 for a gap year divided between au-pairing for two French families in Reims and teaching cookery to American teenagers in Camp America in Maine. On her return to the UK, Elinor headed to Jesus College, Oxford to read French, and now for the third year of her degree, she has once again ventured abroad. Having spent September to December as a student at the Université de Toulouse, she has now embarked on a translating internship at the prestigious publishing house Flammarion in Paris.
Elinor in Toulouse
We had the opportunity to ask Elinor a couple of questions about her adventures. Thank you so much, Elinor!
They publish all sorts of books from novels to academic textbooks. I work in the picture book department which is basically any book that happens to have a lot of pictures (cookery, fashion, art, architecture etc.).
The language itself is pretty much the same (with the exception of a few bits of vocabulary - ‘pain au chocolat’ becoming ‘chocolatine’ in the south, for example) but the accent is very different; it’s quite nasal in the south with some sounds being completely different to how I had learnt them in school and university. There is a form of Parisian slang called ‘verlan’ where the syllables of the standard French word are reversed (‘metro’ becoming ’trome’, for example) but I don’t think it is that popular anymore, a bit like the waning use of cockney rhyming slang.
A fun word is ‘la lèche-vitrine’ which means ‘window shopping’. Word for word, ‘ lèche vitrine' means ‘ window licking’ and I just like the imagery of someone drooling with envy over what they can see but not purchase in a shop window.
Ever since school Molière has been a favourite French author of mine (Mr Lavery’s French classes where we likened characters to popular British biscuits is a lasting memory and still serves me well in literary analysis). I dislike translating poetry because it is pretty much impossible and takes ages.
It was fun to do something so different to anything I had done before, the whole American summer camp culture just doesn’t exist here so it was interesting (if tiring!) experiencing it first hand. ∎
