While following up on my previous blog post on the many uses of the French verb être in my Essential French 1 wall chart calendar tool, I was attracted to this recent newspaper headline:

‘I was thinking, this is it, I am a goner’: Girl, 12, almost mauled to death by black bear, survived by ‘playing dead’

What caught my attention here was not so much the fact that the verb “to be” appears three times in a row as how the French translation of these uses of “to be” illustrates some major differences between the two languages.

How to translate “I was thinking” without the verb être

The construction, “I was thinking,” was looked at in the previous post. Most of the time French simply uses one verb for this English two-verb structure. Here are the most common forms:

I’m thinking – Je pense
I was thinking – Je pensais
I will be thinking – Je penserai

There is however something that sort of resembles the English construction, using en train de. Here are the same examples:

I’m thinking – Je suis en train de penser
I was thinking – J’étais en train de penser
I will be thinking – Je serai en train de penser

It is an option, especially if you want to really emphasize the action of thinking, but it is certainly more cumbersome than the short form.

All that said, I would probably not even use the verb penser. I prefer the pronominal form se dire “to say to oneself,” So I would say: Je me disais “I was saying to myself.”

Translating “this is it” with être

The really interesting use of “to be” for me is in the phrase “this is it,” You have to be really careful here. This can be tricky because there are multiple possible meanings. Here of course we are looking at the idea of “it’s all over.”

I have to say that Google Translate got it right the first time with ça y est. The situation here is a perfect example of the right context for this idiom that I have described in this blog post on ça y est.

Ça y est in the Essential French 1 wall chart calendar

This idiom is so universal that you should be able to use it a few times every day. For this reason it is prominently featured in example number 1-34 of the Essential French 1 wall chart calendar. Here is the complete example :

Ça y est ! La dernière representation est terminée. Ç’a été un énorme plaisir pour moi d’être ici.
That’s it. The last performance is over. It’s really been a great pleasure for me to be here.

As you can see, I deliberately squeezed in four different instances of the verb être in one example.

Translating “I am a goner” with être

Finally, there is “I am a goner.” Google Translate mixed up “goner” and “loner” and gave me Je suis un solitaire. The Babylon on line dictionary was not bad: homme mort; femme morte; homme perdu, fichu, foutu; homme détruit.

Since this is a young girl speaking, we would say: je suis fichue or je suis foutue. I should also point out that this is a context where je suis finie would also have been a good solution.

As we saw in the previous blog post, many English-speakers tend to use je suis finie in the sense of j’ai terminé or “I’ve finished.”

Here is the end result:

‘Je me disais : ça y est, je suis finie’: une fillette de 12 ans, attaquée par un ours noir, survit en faisant la morte

Notice how I’ve used faire la morte to agree in gender with une fillette. The masculine form faire le mort could just as well have been used even with fillette.

Notice as well that the compact English form “Girl, 12” typical of headlines expands to une fillette de 12 ans in French. I will be devoting a blog post soon to this question.

My end translation is just one of many and not necessarily the best. The key point here is the French verb être and the English “to be” have much in common but are often used in different ways.

Stanley Aléong is a polyglot, author, musician and language coach in French, English and Spanish. He likes to share his passion for languages and believes that anybody can learn to speak a foreign language well with the right methods and tools. He has also invented a cool visual learning tool called the Essential French Wall Chart Calendar. Reach him at info@langcal.com.