GrandSrin :
> France hit by strikes, "les usagers" suffering
> from "le mouvement social"...
Yes, quite a specific vocabulary. "Les usagers" are
the users of public commodities like rail and subway
but also electricity & gas... Attempts to call them
"customers" fail regularly. Indeed, a "customer" is
someone who might choose another provider is they
are dissatisfied of the received service. But here
there are no real alternative providers: for example,
there are no other trains than those of SNCF. And
"mouvement social" is the local understatement for
"strike".
> Amid the numerous comments in the dailies, this
> one I cannot translate:
> "on vit une galère pas possible!"
Originally, "galère" means "gallow", and "galérer"
was "to work as hard as a galley slave". Then its
meaning was extended to "to have a lot of hassle,
to have a hard time", and so "galère" meant "hard
time". "On vit une galère pas possible", word for
word, is "we're living an impossibly hard time".
Pierre Hallet
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