Gordon Ramsay does French

Continuing from where I left off on the last post, it was amusing to see that the French seemed to be as obsessed with cooking programmes, and Gordon Ramsay in particular, as we are in the UK. Channel 9 was showing an evening of the Gordon Ramsay programmes where he visits failing restaurants to tell them where they are going wrong. The programme follows a set format. Gordon visits, tastes the food and spits it out making sick noises, looks in the kitchen and finds rotten food and filth and then within two weeks turns them round to become modern and hopefully profitable. All this is interspersed liberally with Gordon swearing at the chef and the owners and anyone else that comes his way. It makes for what some people might see as an entertaining programme but you can’t help thinking that what he actually does isn’t exactly rocket science. I was amused to see how they handled Gordon’s prolific use of swear words in French. Mostly where he uses them as an adjective (‘the f*cking sauce, the f*cking plates’) they just ignored them. Where he uttered ‘f*ck me’ under his breath, this was sometimes translated as ‘merde’ ( or sh*t) and when he called someone a d*ck head this was translated correctly as ‘connard’. On one occasion he told someone to ‘go f*ck yourself’ and this was correctly translated as ‘ va te faire foutre’.