Last weekend I was invited to a lunch party in France. It was in a village not too far from Divonne but I was a little unsure of how to get there. So I used a location finder on my phone and then switched on the vocal directions that went with it.
Thank goodness I wasn’t the one behind the wheel that day, as I might have crashed the car with laughter. The English pronunciation of the French streets was hilarious. Although the lady voicing the route had a nice enough voice, I can only assume she had recorded it somewhere in a studio in Los Angeles and wasn’t that au fait with français.
In Nyon she told us to drive up Alfred Cortot pronounced “cortott” (as in rhymes with forgot). In France she directed us towards the rue “des bains”. She pronounced this as “Dez Bayns” which sounded a...