Comments on: Everything isn’t miscellaneous in France

By: Neo

Neo — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 11:32:40 +0000

Many thanks to you for your site!

By: Stephanie Booth

Stephanie Booth — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 23:38:26 +0000

“Tout est divers” is how I would have translated it. Closest equivalent you’ll get. I label my boxes “divers” and not “autres”.

By: w

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 22:20:32 +0000

One possible solution:
If the French use “Autre” in the same way we use a “misc” tag, put “Autre” in quotes.

Another possibility:
Put the English word “Miscellaneous” in quotes. Most French will recognize it’s English and know the meaning of the word.

By: w

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 22:17:42 +0000

One possible solution:
If the French use “Autre” in the same way we use a “misc” tag, put “Autre” in quotes.

Another possibility:
Put the English word “Miscellaneous” in quotes. Most French will recognize it’s English and know the meaning of the word.

By: AKMA

AKMA — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 19:11:34 +0000

To hark back to the Foucauldian discussion that we started lo these many years ago, what about [spinning off from Jon's suggestion above]

Le DÃ©sordre Des Choses?

By: Jon Husband

Jon Husband — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 16:09:29 +0000

I dunno .. “Tout est par ci et par la” (Everything Is Here and There) might work ?

By: Jon Husband

Jon Husband — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 16:07:08 +0000

“Tout est divers” is about as close as you’ll get, I agree. I think that “Le desordre est fondamental” might be similar but there you get into what is meant by order and disorder, and I don’t think that is the same basic notion as miscellany.

By: Phil

Phil — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 14:58:41 +0000

Um… that’s if ‘cadre’ means ‘shelf’. Which it may not. It’s been a while.

By: Phil

Phil — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 12:13:27 +0000

“Tout est divers” isn’t bad – “everything is various”, roughly.

It also evokes “faits divers”, an untranslatable rubric used in the French press for everyday-life news stories. (It’s something like a cross between “In Other News”, “True Crime” and “Stop Press”.) One definition I’ve seen says ‘a fait divers is something that could happen to anyone’.

But languages differ, and you may not be able to find the ideal mot juste. (I was surprised to notice the other day that Arundhati Roy’s The god of small things translates as Le dieu des petits riens – ‘little nothings’?) Your hypothetical(?) French translator might be better off casting the net wider. “Ceci n’est pas un cadre”, maybe?