Thomas is a teenaged boy in the television comedy Les Parent. He and his brothers typically receive irrational and difficult-to-understand lessons about life from their parents.
See if you can decipher this near-incomprehensible quote by Thomas. In it, he provides his parents with a summary of what he’s supposed to have just learned from them about buying a car:
« Faque dans le fond, je peux pas acheter une auto qui coûte trop pas cher, mais j’ai pas d’argent non plus pour en acheter une qui coûte pas pas cher. Je peux pas en acheter une qui a trop roulé, ni une qui a trop pas roulé. Pis idéalement, ça serait mieux que je connaisse pas trop le vendeur, mais faudrait pas que je le connaisse trop pas non plus, c’est ça? »
This quote was posted on the Les Parent Facebook page. Admittedly, I haven’t seen the episode it comes from. But this sort of dialogue is so typical of the boys in Les Parent that it’s not hard to imagine that the discussion took place between Thomas and at least one of his parents.
I’ll risk a translation into English. To maintain the same level of incomprehensibility, I’ll translate pas cher (inexpensive) literally as “not expensive.” Here goes…
“So basically, I can’t buy a car that costs too not expensive, but I don’t have the money to buy one that costs not not expensive either. I can’t buy one that’s been too driven, nor one that’s been too not driven. And ideally, it would be better to know the car seller not too well, but not not too well either. Is that what you’re telling me?”
Hmm. I think Thomas will be taking the bus!
Did you wonder about the meaning of faque dans le fond at the beginning of the quote?
We can translate this as “so, basically” in English, where faque means “so” and dans le fond means “basically.”
Faque is an informal usage, a contraction of (ça) fait que. The use of faque isn’t particularly elegant sounding, so it’s avoided in more careful speech. You’ll hear faque very frequently during informal conversations, however.
[Quote taken from the Les Parent Facebook page, 22 February 2013.]
