Chev. Dr Laurent Seychell from the French Department was invited to give a lecture on the theory of translations at the Sorbonne University Paris IV earlier this month. Dr Seychell took as a model of analysis a third of the European Constitution written originally in French, where he compared French to English.

He divided his paper in two parts: linguistic; and the meaning aspects in the theory of translations. The former was then subdivided into three components: acts of speech in discourse analysis; stylistics options; and sentence analysis between the two languages.

In the second part, his main concern was the study of distortions carried out by the English translators during their translation from French into English.

It is the third time that Dr Seychell has been invited by the same university. On the first occasion (in 2000) he was invited to sit on the board as member of a Ph.D. thesis, and on the second occasion (in 2004) he gave a lecture on the teaching of French as a foreign language following his publication of a method entitled Francais des compagnies aériennes.