Talk:Ni Putes Ni Soumises

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	France Portal Ni Putes Ni Soumises is within the scope of WikiProject France, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to France and Monaco on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please join the project and help with our open tasks.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses.

[edit] Translation issues

My French translations are very rough-and-ready. Anyone care to polish them?

I was particularly stuck on quartiers, in the end I translated that as housing projects which is really closer to cités, but I thought it should have a more specific meaning than "neighbourhood".

Also, I found references to a male "response" called Ni machos ni proxos - what does proxos mean?

Cheers, fabiform | talk 07:27, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Proxos stands for proxénète which is in france the man who looks after a prostitute, the one who protects her and who takes money from her. I'm french, don't know if my explanation is good, hope you'll understand. Tipiac from french wikipedia

Ah, thank you Tipiac, you're explanation was perfectly clear.  :) The English word for that is pimp. I'll add that into the article later. Cheers, fabiform | talk 13:12, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Ni ... ni ...

How should we translate Ni Putes Ni Soumises? There are several options depending on what we want to emphasise.

• Neither/Nor is good for the most accurate translation of the construction of the French. It loses some of the, how can I put this, linguistic power of the French however. The repetiton of Ni makes the French catchy, but Neither/Nor replaces this with a two/one syllable construction which is actually quite formal for a slogan or catchphrase.
• Not/Not focuses on replicating the snappy aspect of the French, and suffers from a grammatical point of view since it's a less precise translation.
• Not/Or replaces some of the Neither/Nor meaning (it is used in informal English to replace neither/nor), retains the one/one pattern, but loses the N__/N__ pattern of all the other translations.

Also, the rest of the phrase. Pute could be Bitch or Whore. Bitch doesn't really carry the same meaning of a woman as a sexual object which I assume the French is trying to get across. Soumises - is this being used as an adjective or a noun (does it exist as a noun in French?). It seems a bit strange to me to have a slogan which reads Neither [noun] Nor [adjective].

Here are the translations we've had so far, and some I've found online:

• Neither Bitch nor Submissive
• Neither Bitches nor Submissives
• Not Whores Not Submissives
• Neither Whores Nor Submissives
• Not Whores Or Submissives
• Neither Whores Nor Submissive

• Not Whores Not Servants
• Neither Whores Nor Doormats
• Neither Whore Nor Submissive
• Neither Whores Nor Downtrodden
• Neither a whore, nor a submissive housewife
• Neither Slags Nor Submissives
• Neither whores nor controlled
• Neither Whores Nor Slaves
• Not Whores and Not Subordinated
• Neither prostitutes nor submissive
• No whores, nor submissive
• Neither whores, nor downtrodden women
• Neither sluts nor submissive
• Neither whore nor housewife
• Neither whores, nor submitted (ha ha)

- :) fabiform | talk 05:51, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Aut Caesar, aut nihil... the Latin languages certainly have an easier way with constructions of this kind. My vote is for "neither... nor...", only because it's the closest reflection of the French grammar. The force of the repetition of the original is lost ("snappiness" – exactly!), but I think if you're translating an organization's name, then it best not to get too creative, too far from the original. So my vote is for "Neither Whores Nor Submissive". Although I'm tempted by "Neither Slags Nor Slaves", I'd hesitate to use such a loose translation without getting an OK from the organization itself. Anyone else? –Hajor 14:05, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I have a stupid question. Why do you absolutely want to translate organisation names, or people names ? The article about Médecins Sans Frontières is in french, right ? Why would you translate this name, to such a point no one would recognise the original translation ?

It's not about translating the organization's name. It's about providing an into-English gloss for the name on its first occurrence: to give a sense of what the name means to those who've forgotten their schoolboy French, certainly not to re-baptise it in a foreign language. That explains my insistence, above, on not getting too far from either the grammar or meaning of the French. As you'll have seen, the rest of the article then uses the French name, or the French abbreviation, on subsequent mentions. Ultimately, not that dissimilar to the MSF article. Best, –Hajor 01:59, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)

ah, okay, I thought you wanted to change the title of the article. I think Neither Whores Nor Submissives is best. It is certainly not "no...no...", and I think Whores is nearer the french meaning in that context. ant

[edit] Elisabeth Badinter

I'm not sure if this following link is really representative of and thus sutable for an overview of french feminism as Badinters views are biased and disputed and don't represent a "mainstream" or generally accepted view on the state of thing. *A discussion on French feminism. Maybe this should be discussed in a separate article. --84.131.35.1 22:22, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)