"traiter" meaning "to deal with"/"to handle"

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Permalink Reply by Vedas on June 12, 2013 at 11:19am

Hello,

yes you can say traiter une affaire which means to negociate or to make a deal

ex : Il a traité directement avec les producteurs

You would be understood if you used your sentence but it is not exactly what would come to mind , we 'd rather say:

.....qui s'occupe de la publicité

and if you used traite it would be more correct to use qui traite de/du :

.......est un site qui traite de communication, medias sociaux, marketing et publicité.

ce livre traite du vide contemporain

Incidentally you're likely to hear young people saying Il me traite/ il m'a traité  for he has insulted me / to call somebody something

traiter here is intransitive so this epidemic usage is grammatically wrong,                 .

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EducatorPermalink Reply by George Hunt on June 12, 2013 at 1:27pm

 Can  "il m'a traité"   be used on its own like that  to mean "he insulted me" or  would you need to be specific :eg "il m'a traité de salope " ? 

 

By the way ,in that particular example I can see that traité seems to be more commonly used than traitée which I had assumed was more correct.

Is that just looseness of language?

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Permalink Reply by Vedas on June 12, 2013 at 2:06pm

That's what I tried to explain you need to say il m'a traité de....

It sounds very bad when you hear young people saying il m'a traité !

this bad use is very recent.

Don't see exactly why you expected traitée in the mentioned sentence.

Are you refering to the agreement of the past participle?

The auxiliary is the verb avoir so the past participle agrees with the direct object if it is placed before the auxiliairy, here it is placed after it.

Elle a été traitée de .... here you need e because of the use of the verb/participle être, agreement is with the subject

Il a été traité de .....

Hope it helped

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Permalink Reply by Vedas on June 12, 2013 at 2:34pm

Hi,

on second thought you 're right in your exemple, the cod is an attribut with de so the participle should agree :

ex: on les a traitées de folles

When it comes to predicative adjectives it seems that many writers differ, some say that it can be invariable except when it is introduced by comme/de/pour which is the case here traiter de

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Permalink Reply by alan gould on June 12, 2013 at 2:45pm

one of the uses in the dictionary is: 

traiter qn de qch      to call sb a sth  

Il m'a traité d'imbécile.      He called me an idiot.  

 

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Permalink Reply by alan gould on June 12, 2013 at 3:11pm

I'm confused about using "traiter" in business.  i've copied from the dictionary below: 

     [+affaire]   to deal with, to handle

   (=qualifier)  

   (=négocier)   to deal  

Your example "Il a traité directement avec les producteurs" is an example of using "to deal" to mean "to negotiate" or "to bargain."  i understand the use of "traiter" to mean "to deal" in the sense of "to be about" --   "Cet article traite des sans-abri.      This article is about the homeless."  But since you said "s'occuper" would be used in business rather than "traiter" can you give me another way to use it in business.  I don't know why the dictionary has "to deal with, to handle."   I'd also like to see "traiter une affaire" used in a sentence, please.      

 

 

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Permalink Reply by Vedas on June 12, 2013 at 3:42pm

Ok,

the first meaning of traiter was to set up things through discussing/ negotiating 

So here are some exemples I found:

 -traiter les affaires courantes du club: to deal with the current matters of the club

-Il traite avec une entreprise basée en Inde.

-Comment traiter des affaires en Espagne ? (this is the title of a book)

-Pour traiter des affaires au Brésil il faut s'implanter.

 

to transact business with is another possible translation

(sous-traiter= subcontract)

Il sous-traite avec la chine

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Permalink Reply by alan gould on June 12, 2013 at 6:14pm

yes, i came across subcontract as "sous-traiter".  i would love to use your source.  where did you get your examples?  thanks.  

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Permalink Reply by Vedas on June 12, 2013 at 6:30pm

Well I made up some sentences and found the others on Google (traiter+ affaire)

I didn't find many exemples by the way.

Otherwise you can try to find occurences on http://www.linguee.fr/

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