Originally Posted by vanHorck
The French language is in my humble opinion too ambivalent to be used in a factual environment like a cockpit in distress.
Well sure. Only native anglophones /[insert your own culture], preferably those raised near [insert your place], should be recruited to fly modern jets. Many languages and cultures are unable to provide the mandatory level of efficiency required. People tends to say words that, once translated into English /[ or whatever], doesn't make enough sense to me. Consequently, such talks should be banned from cockpits and considered unsuited for high-technological environements due to their intrinsic flaw at being fully understandable by me.
Such statement do not surprise me. I could say exactly the same about English/[insert your own langage] forms but I'm not so ethnocentric.
What cause such a distorsion about the exact meaning of those words is primary due to several factors [many that a non native, whatever his proficiency level, would never catch in a lifetime]:
1. We are not listening at what they said, it is not complete and we are reading it from a poorly made transcription. Add the fact that, for the majority of the readers here, you are reading it from a poorly made translation of this poorly made transcription.
2. French talk is quite different from French written forms. Without its prosodie - rythm, tone, emphasis, etc. - it may be clearly ambiguous from the direct transcription. Hence, without listening the original conversation in integrality, I'm a bit clueless about their talks referential. Some of the referential is also lost by not seeing them, because there is many "shortcuts" used for talking. In fact, the ammount of informations they had, when talking to each others, is not part of this transcription. I'm sure that accessing to the original record would clear many ambiguities.
3. I suppose that BEA, at this stage, released the minimal work on CVR voluntarily; only people which had heard the CVR would have a right idea of what happened in the cockpit. There was strictly no effort made to make it really meaningful in English version -it is called a litteral translation: emphasis is put on words, without bothering about sense.
4. Last but not least, making sense is not a question of langage, it is a question of discipline. What I'm able to infer from the first reading is a serious lack of crew discipline. No further comment is needed about it.