A lady rang the door bell at ten, arriving for the meeting an hour early, and looking very puzzled not to find the notaire already present. She checked and realised she'd made a mistake, but insisted in not coming in until he arrived. At eleven Madame Morel, with a Madame O'Shea reappeared with Monsieur Giringhelli the notaire, to make funeral arrangements. Throughout the hour long session, only French was spoken, although all three spoke English, Madame O'Shea is Irish and had lived and worked in Switzerland for over forty years. Many of the residents of Nova Vita care home are English speakers so they often need to, but this occasion was an opportunity for me to find out if my French is as adequate for pastoral work as it once was. The last hour long French conversation I had was five years ago in Vinaros, when I was door-stepped by two francophone Jehovah's Witness missionaries in Spain!
As a result of the discussion, I started work on an Anglican funeral service in French, reasoning that the people who had accompanied the man over the past five years of his life were going to miss him more than remote relatives in Britain who were not in a position to attend the service, and if any of his former colleagues turned up for the service, they'd know the languages of Switzerland. He had worked as an engineer for Swiss company CIBA his entire career, in Basle and then in the Chablias, likewise his wife, who died twelve years ago.
Thankfully, many of the essentials of funeral liturgy in French are now downloadable from the web site of the diocese in Europe, and there's any number of on-line bible translations to draw from. The main challenge was to assemble the essentials of a biography I'd picked up from our conversation into a eulogy, and then get Google Translate to render it in French. It's 95% accurate, but still needs a native speaker to scrutinise it. Thankfully my pastor friend Valdo lives just up the valley in Aigle, and we'd already been in touch about meeting up, so I was able to send him the finished eulogy for checking. Getting all this material into shape took the rest of the day, but I was pleased to find that I could do all this as satisfactorily in French as I regularly do in English. As Clare says - like riding a bike, you never forget how to speak another, you just need confidence to have a go.
As a result of the discussion, I started work on an Anglican funeral service in French, reasoning that the people who had accompanied the man over the past five years of his life were going to miss him more than remote relatives in Britain who were not in a position to attend the service, and if any of his former colleagues turned up for the service, they'd know the languages of Switzerland. He had worked as an engineer for Swiss company CIBA his entire career, in Basle and then in the Chablias, likewise his wife, who died twelve years ago.
Thankfully, many of the essentials of funeral liturgy in French are now downloadable from the web site of the diocese in Europe, and there's any number of on-line bible translations to draw from. The main challenge was to assemble the essentials of a biography I'd picked up from our conversation into a eulogy, and then get Google Translate to render it in French. It's 95% accurate, but still needs a native speaker to scrutinise it. Thankfully my pastor friend Valdo lives just up the valley in Aigle, and we'd already been in touch about meeting up, so I was able to send him the finished eulogy for checking. Getting all this material into shape took the rest of the day, but I was pleased to find that I could do all this as satisfactorily in French as I regularly do in English. As Clare says - like riding a bike, you never forget how to speak another, you just need confidence to have a go.
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