Babel France in 2008

BabelParis — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 10:52:00 +01:00

What’s new on La Parisienne for the new year ?

First and foremost Happy New Year to all, dear readers of La Parisienne, on behalf of the whole team; writers, translators, chronicle writers and those working behind the scenes.

We also wish to thank you for your loyalty, which made La Parisienne the second most read blog of the babelsphere in 2007. The interest you have touches us very much.

This is why we decided that 2008 would be a year of further development for La Parisienne with a busier than ever Schedule.

Full time Babel France:

Since January 2008, Jean-Sébastien Lefebvre, general secretary of Babel France, became a full-time « volunteer » for the association. Thanks to this peculiar status of “voluntary civil servant”, Jean-Sébastien will be able to devote himself to Babel France for a modest compensation.

Decipher the Franco-European debate:

What will be Jean-Sébastien’s job?

First, he will work for the networking trying to manage a better coordination between all cafébabel.com’s editorial offices, which are spread at Europe’s four corners.

And to consolidate Babel’s France structure, thus permitting it to be more active and to aim for higher goals. The development of public opinion is also channelled by the local stage.

Working in relation with the Central European Redaction (also located in Paris), the aim is to europeanise the French news debate. We will need to be more reactive to what is happening in France in order to look at events or declarations in a European perspective. France’s behaviour at the European level will also be examined, just to see if the words of our politicians match with their actions in Brussels…

And since Europe is always touted as the source of all evils in France, why not check these assumptions?

Due to this focus given on reactivity to the news, multilinguism on La Parisienne will take a different shape. It used to be a rule; it will now follow a more varied scheme. You will still be able to read general articles written by our many collaborators in every language. As for the news posts however, written on the day or the day before a specific event, they will be first published in French before being translated a few days later. And you may also find some of his articles in cafébabel.com’s columns, giving space to the European-national debates.

All these texts will be merged in a section called France-Europe.

New sections:

New sections will come to life to make La Parisienne even more complete.

« Paris sur le Vif » : through her chronicles, Soili will uncover the daily life and experiences of a Finnish Erasmus Sorbonne student…And there is quite a lot to say in the country of frog eaters and their hyperactive president.

« L’Union européenne en vraie » : even though it was inaugurated last year, this section should become more important in order to cover concrete actions taken by the EU for its citizens. There will be a particular focus on France so that no one could complain along the lines of “now seriously, Europe is really useless”.

« Présidence française de l’Union européenne » : on July 1^st 2008, France will succeed to Slovenia at the head of the EU for what will probably be one of the last rotating presidencies due to the Lisbon treaty. So what has the French government in store for us? If all the head of states have to follow the pace of the French president, there will surely be an avalanche of sick leaves in the various European chanceries.

Viva Espana !

At first bilingual with an English and French version and then trilingual with the addition of Italian, La Parisienne goes quadrilingual with a German version. It now wishes to open up to the Iberian Peninsula, a Spanish version being on the way. La Parisienne does not forget its latin charm! Any translators interested?

Monthly conferences in Paris:

The first Paris on the Ground experience was a nice success, “Quelle politique de ville pour quelle société?” (“Which city policy for which society?”) did not attract crowds as numerous as a Stade de France event would have but the debate was of a high quality. This is why, our ambition for 2008 will be to organise a European café or conference every month very likely in cooperation with other Parisian European constituencies.

You wil find information about these events on La Parisienne and you are all already invited.

Also on the agenda, we have other ideas to make Babel France an actor of the Parisian European life.

Who would like to join us?

With more than twenty writers, six radio reviewers, and another twenty translators to deal with the four language versions, Babel France is still looking for new talents. If you live in the Parisian area, do not hesitate to contact us to join the team. The same goes if you are far away, we do not discriminate against people of the ‘province’.

Translation, edition, organisation, discussion, there has to be something for you at Babel France.

Hasta siempre la victoria,

The Parisian team.

Die-hard multilinguism

BabelParis — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 07:57:00 +01:00

Some will say French is a beautiful language, isn’t it ? But multilinguism sounds way more dandy. It has this enigmatic charm that makes it so attractive; so many different letters and you say the same things, it keeps the mystery alive…

In its quest of supreme beauty, Babel France team wish they could give their readers a translation for every single radios programmes in every single languages found in La Parisienne … which won’t happen : spoken translations of what is said in French on Radio Campus are simply impossible. It will just be then a sort of section for French-speaking people…

But “sort of” I did say ! Since from now on, our editorial committee will make sure to have the themes we talked about on radio turned into articles.

Oh yes, you have always been in our mind …

Jean-Sébastien Lefebvre
Translation Cécile Zandvliet

Babel on Radio Campus

BabelParis — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 19:38:00 +01:00

This is Paris speaking, Babel France here to the students.

Babel France is not only running a blog but the Parisian staff turns out to be pluralist and a jack of all trades: they are not afraid of writing and sound. On the contrary, gimme a mic or I’ll make a scene.

Since beginning of October, every Thursday nights, in Radio Campus’ program “L’Extraballe” (7 to 8pm on 93.8FM), Babel France holds the microphone for a 5 minutes spot with this motto: “Straight to the point, let’s talk about Europe.” Don’t laugh; it took us an hour to come up with this phrase… A small team then changes over every week to make this moment of radio bliss possible. The Belgian political crisis, Polish elections, the Reform Treaty, minority languages, Erasmus life are some of the themes we talked about. All in all we’ll talk about everything that comes to our head keeping in mind this leitmotiv: EUROOOOOOPE.

To share the productions of this partnership, La Parisienne’s radio team has decided to put online their spots. We wish we had done it before but technical considerations deterred us from doing so. But after a fierce battle, we defeated the Internet technology; victory is ours! Vae Victis.

We will shortly make it up to you and a new column will soon see the light of day: Babel France on live. The old spots will be online before long and new ones as they go along.

Just strain your ears, close your eyes, you’re in Europe.

Jean-Sébastien Lefebvre

Translation : Cecile Zandvliet

La Parisienne of Cafébabel.com - The Parisienne Team

Babel France in 2008

Die-hard multilinguism

Babel on Radio Campus