This is an appendage to my November 19 post about fixers, the local bilinguals, often Natural Translators, who serve as liaison interpreters to foreign journalists in conflict zones.
Listening to a French journalist on TV 5 this week, I was jolted by hearing her use fixeur. It means the English term fixer has now been borrowed into French. At any rate for the time being, until the interventionist language authorities in France or Quebec wake up to it and try to impose something more native.
It no doubt helped that French already had the verb fixer. But that doesn’t have among its meanings the mildly derisive one that fix has in the English fixer.
I wonder what other languages have imported it.
REFERENCE
Le Petit Robert.
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Until the 19th century, a "fixeur" was a "drogman" (no relation to drugs...) or a "truchement". Of course there was no TV back then... only literature.
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