Credit Lyonnais Case: A Failure to Communicate

Exhibit A: the federal court order in Garamendi v. Altus Finance denying MAAF's motion to prevent the phrase "Quel jeu doit-on jouer vis-a-vis des autorites de Californie?" from being translated as "What game must we play with the California authorities?"

To wit: a five-page blistering attack on the defense's attempt to translate it in a way that wouldn't make the defendants sound quite so guilty. The judge is so withering in his criticism of certified translator Renee Zarelli's alternate translation that I wonder if poor Ms. Zarelli is going to have to change careers (or identities?).

On the one hand, the defense's proposed alternate translation ("what approach" instead of "what game") is a serious stretch. There are at least three different ways to say "approach" in a question like this in French, and none of them was used.

On the other, Judge Matz apparently has no idea what translation is. He castigates Zarelli for relying "only on a French-to-French dictionary." Sacre bleu, god forbid she should look in a language's own dictionary to see what the connotation of a word is! He suggests that the way to ascertain the English meaning of "jeu" is to simply look in a French-to-English dictionary. Uh, Your Honor? If it were that simple, we wouldn't need translators: we could just look stuff up ourselves. Heck, if it were that simple, Babelfish would work! Just try pasting a foreign URL into that site to see the kind of garbage automatic translators come up with...

I bet what's going on here is an Old World vs. New culture clash: a French person could utter that jeu phrase innocently; an American could not. The French could, because they love abstractions and they're excruciatingly attentive to precisely how social interactions unfold: they use jeu in contexts where we would never use game unless we meant it cynically. But they don't necessarily mean it that way; jouer le jeu means to conform your behavior to the implicit rules of an activity, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're trying to pull one over on the other parties involved. Just because you're aware that you're playing a game doesn't mean you're playing it unfairly. The other side is also supposed to know that on some level it's a game--especially when the other side is a bunch of hotshot lawyers and politicians, as in this case.