Some Translations

[Clause]

http://pastebin.com/Y8b3styP

I was playing around with Google suggestions and happened upon the Swedish article "Varför är amerikaner fetare än fransmän", and showed it to fellow hobbyist Awkward Socrates, who decided to translate it into English. I decided I wanted in on the fun and started my own translation by paragraph from the bottom upwards.

We'd appreciate feedback on our translations, if you'd be so kind as to offer some.

[Awkward Socrates]

Oh, hello!
Here is the first half of the translation.
http://pastebin.com/2HBFghWY
My translation skills are substandard, so I'm not sure about its correctness. At all.

[Unknown]

Why are Americans fatter than Frenchmen people?

One in three Americans is fat, but only one in ten Frenchmen French people is. Behind these figures, researchers have found deep cultural differences. In perception of food and meals, the USA and France stand as are opposites in many ways.

France and the USA have many similarities. Both are rich industrialized nations, leading western nations, there, modernization came simultaneously, and in both countries slenderness became an ideal from 1890-the turn of the century and forward (before this, women in the bourgeoisie wore well-padded clothing to seem look more filled-out).

Still, both countries are radically different in how one has succeeded to live up to the ideal. Today, in the USA, today about 30% of the adult population is fat--they have BMI, Body Mass Index, over 30--while the percentage of fat people in France is only 10%. The USA is the fattest country in the world, while France is one of the smallest.

What are the causes of this dramatic difference? A part of it may be due to the fact that the average American gets around in a car and watches TV more than the average Frenchman and therefore probably moves less. But also, researchers claim, a large part of the explanation lies in deep cultural differences between both countries in perception of food and meals.

Gap between Europe and the USA
The French sociologist Claude Fischler, head of an interdisciplinary research institute in Paris, has been specialized to in studying attitudes and beliefs concerning food in different countries. In the beginning of the 2000s, he led a very comprehensive examination of attitudes toward food and meals in six countries: France, the USA, England, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. The whole study has interviewed over 7000 people. Over 7000 people have been interviewed for the study.

The examination shows a large gap between continental Europe and the USA, while England lies somewhere in between. The actual opposites are France and the USA. Differences in attitudes can explain a large part of the differences in fatness, says Claude Fischler.

-When Americans speak of food, they speak of nutrition and health, he says. It is only fat, proteins, and calories. When Frenchmen people speak of food, they speak of flavor and quality. In interviews recurringly, Frenchmen speak French people often mention of the joy of sitting at a table and enjoying a good meal with friends or family. Americans say not don't say a word about any pleasure that comes with eating.


Despite Americans’ constant obsession with their health in connection with the food, they rarely succeed/manage to live up to these requirements: only a third say that they actually eat healthy. Among Frenchmen people, most of them think of enjoyment, and three quarters of them eat healthy, since much a lot of concern around the food seems very counterproductive.


Choice vs. Tradition
Another difference between the countries is that Americans see eating as an individual’s own responsibility, while meals for Frenchmen people are anchored in a social tradition. In responses to interview questions, Americans stress all the time about how important it is with choice; of for these reasons they prefer, for example, an ice cream shop with fifty flavors to choose from, rather than having ten. Frenchmen people, however, prefer a store with ten flavors, where they probably assess the chance that the ice cream shop has homemade ice cream and of good quality they have a better chance of coming across good quality homeade ice cream in an ice cream shop.

In the USA a large amount of meals are ingested individually and on the go, while Frenchmen hold fast to French people save their meal order (swedishism??) mealtimes with for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. A large investigation study from 2002, done by the French equivalent of the Public Health Institute, shows that nine Frenchmen out of ten French people still eat in this way. They spend a total of an hour and a half per day for these three meals, and eight out of ten eat their dinner with family. These differences have a large significance in the obesity epidemic, says Claude Fischler:

-The American vision perception is based from an understood hypothesis that the individual self can regulate its his or her food intake to be sure it is in balance. But this hypothesis is actually not scientifically based. I think that we need support of for collective social regulations.

-In France there is a stong culture around meals, with a number of principles that most still hold fast follow: that one will adjusts the food within the seasons, that it is important with rigid meals and such so on. I believe that these rules have protected many Frenchmen people from obesity. The Food is part of a collective and social sphere, where it is a given that one sits at a table at a specific time and does not eat between meals.

I did my best to correct the translation to make the English sound more natural. You cannot always translate everything literally.

[hashi]

Just out of curiosity, what is wrong with saying Frenchmen? It's a valid word in English, afaik means more or less the same as "French people" (and is also a more literal translation of fransmän).

[Unknown]

"Frenchmen" sounds very old fashioned to me. I have never heard "Frenchmen" being used in reports in English like that one ever in my life. So I used "French people" to translate from "Fransmän".