Thème Home-Page

A description of the course (in French), including the exam, can be found here

Some on-line dictionaries (including translation dictionaries) and thesauri (dictionaries of synonyms) can be found here. Merriam-Webster's site offers similar services here.

The text to prepare for the coming week can be found below. Students should prepare the text in advance, in order to get the most benefit from the class. (The texts are in .pdf (Adobe "Acrobat") format, and may take several seconds to load to your computer.)

• Some more or less random thoughts & suggestions about translating, and more generally, about using English properly can be found here. [Material added November 24, 2006]
• Classes on Oct 5^th did not require advance preparation. (If you did not attend the class, you can get the worksheet that was distributed here; you will need it, because it includes the first vocabulary list* (vocab will be part of the exam; look here). (On-line downloadable documents are in "PDF" format, and can be read using Acrobat® Reader®, by Adobe Software. If you do not already have a copy of this software, you can download it for free here.)
• Click here to find the text to prepare for 12 Oct, 2006. (The vocabulary* for this week is the literary vocab included in the hand-out for 5 Oct.) A suggested translation of the text can be found here (really! ).
• Since there was not time to work on the text initially planned for 12/10/2006 ("Le talent est-il américain?" du Figaro), it will be summarily dealt with on 19 Oct. The text slated for 19/10/2006 (1st page of Camus's La Peste) will be on the program for 26 Oct.
• Click here to find the text to prepare for 26 Oct, 2006 (1st page of Camus's La Peste). Click here to find the associated vocabulary* list. A suggested translation of the text is available here.
• No text for 2 Nov: (Charles C. Hadley will be absent that day).
• On 9 Nov, we finished the passage from Camus in two groups and got close to finishing in the others.
• On 16 Nov, we will finish translating the passage from La Peste, and go on to a passage from Jules Verne's Tour du monde en 80 jours. (This "pdf" file includes an engraving, which apparently prevents some systems from opening it; if you cannot open it, you may be able to get the text with the engraving in html format here, or just the text here. All three include the associated vocabulary list.) A suggested translation is available here.
• Click here to find the text (Gide's Faux Monnayeurs) to prepare after Camus's La Peste. The associated vocabulary* list is included. A suggested translation of the text is available here.
• The text for the last class hour (December 14, 2006) is here. (The vocab list is included in the file with the text.) A suggested translation of the text is available here.

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* Vocabulary lists with translations can be found here. (Caution: Any such list necessarily creates a false impression of certainty. It should be borne in mind that vocabulary, like other linguistic phenomena, always exists in context; in other words, these lists should be thought of as starting points for further inquiry: look up some of these words in an "all-English" dictionary to see when and how they are best used.)