Sarkozy sets his sights on 2017 election as rivals flounder
08/12/2014
Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been re-elected as leader of the opposition party the UMP. His candidacy for the 2017 presidential election is still not certain but his rivals are in a state of disarray and may not be able to stop him standing in 2017. On the eve of the presidential election in …
Routes into Languages: a student ambassador’s experience
26/11/2014
Fresh from her speech at the recent Routes into Languages national training event, Hayley Smith (BA Economics with French) speaks about her experience as a student ambassador for the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies. Routes into Languages”is a consortium of universities working together with schools and colleges to enthuse and encourage people to study languages. …
How the far right landed in the French Senate
14/10/2014
As if the French president, François Hollande, didn’t have enough woes, elections for the senate have dealt him another blow. Three years after Hollande’s socialists won the first ever majority for the left in the upper house, the right wing has taken back an assembly it believes to be its own. And worse still, among …
Building Images: AHRC funds a new project to study relations between China and Africa from the perspective of cultural exchange and translation
06/05/2014
The intensification of China’s involvement in Africa over the last fifteen years has prompted much debate in media reports worldwide, as well as in academic circles, and interpretations of what China is ‘doing’ in Africa vary widely. The Independent’s choice of words in a 2009 article, in which China’s involvement in Africa is referred to …
Nottingham Advantage Award: Students Become Teachers!
17/02/2014
During the Autumn Semester 2013-14, and fresh from their year abroad as British Council Language Assistants, three CLAS final-year undergraduate students – Olivia Gowie and Matthew York from the Department of German Studies, and Melissa Watson from the Department of French & Francophone Studies – undertook a language-teaching project at Greenfields Primary School, Nottingham, as …
Subtitling for Beginners in the Department of French and Francophone Studies
16/01/2014
Earlier in December, the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies (CLAS) welcomed a group of burgeoning local Year 11/12 language students for a taste of academic life here at the University of Nottingham. During their half-day ‘taster’ visit, the students attended a French-English subtitling mini-lecture and workshop led by Drs Pierre-Alexis Mével and Dalida …
The Mysterious Constance Farrington
06/08/2013
When people talk about translations, they usually do one of two things: either, they treat the translation as if it wasn’t a translation, talking about it as if it were a carbon copy of the original, or else they criticise the translation, bemoaning what is ‘lost’. This has certainly been the case for Constance Farrington’s …
Jazz in France
26/07/2013
In a poem written in the 1930s, Léopold Sédar Senghor, a black student from French West Africa, soon to be recognised as a founding father of the négritude movement, recounts strolling down the Rue Fontaine in Paris, past the open door of the Cabane cubaine, an early jazz club. As the sounds of jazz spill …
On subtitles and subtitling software
26/04/2013
As the notion of accessibility has become one of the dominant shibboleths of a growing tribe of media specialists, film subtitles – whose single primary function is to provide access to what would otherwise be inaccessible – are still often facing criticism coming from all corners. And it’s true, subtitles really are a funny old …
Can positive changes result from genocide? PhD student Caroline Williamson tells us about her research
11/03/2013
Research carried out in Nottingham University’s Department of French and Francophone Studies found inspiring positive changes among Rwandan women, as PhD student Caroline Williamson explains. Funded by an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award, Caroline worked in Rwanda for a year with the Nottinghamshire-based NGO the Aegis Trust, which campaigns against genocide and crimes against humanity, and runs …
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