"de cote de" vs "de" (how to translate "from" into French)

Hi-- I am a little confused about whether these terms are interchangeable. I read that "du cote de" means "from" in a "directional" sense. I'd appreciate some thoughts re their useage. thank you

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on January 28, 2011 at 3:46pm

The word côté is slightly odd in that de tends to be used with it without necessarily carrying the notion of "from". So for example de ce côté de... often means "on this side of...". Similarly, du côté de... would usually mean something like "in/to/from a place near to the side (of the country/region/hill/street) close to..." -- in other words, it has the idea of "over there by...", "from over there by...", "in the general direction of...".

But whether the meaning is essentially "from", "to", "in" etc tends to be indicated by the verb. So if I say: J'habite du côté de Villeriche, it means something like "I live over on the other side of the hill/department near Villeriche". There's no sense of "from". On the other hand, if I say Je viens du côté de Villeriche, then there's a clear notion of "I come from over by Villeriche". If I say Je dois me rendre du côté de Villeriche, the idea is "I have to go to a place on the other side by Villeriche" etc.

So in summary: du côté de (and in general, de with the word côté) doesn't really indicate any direction at all: the direction usually depends on the verb.

In general, to translate "from", you can often use de if the idea is clear from the verb (so with verbs like venir, provenir). So e.g. Il vient de Paris. Un chalet construit de bois. Otherwise, other possibilities include:

- en provenance de : effectively means something like "which started its journey in...", e.g. le train en provenance de Marseille

- depuis can often carry the notion of "starting/looking out from this place", e.g. La vue depuis la fenêtre = "The view from the window"; Depuis Paris on a mis 3 heures, "From Paris, it took us 3 hours". (You could use de in this last case.)

- à partir de often carries the idea of "starting from this moment/value", e.g. À partir de ce lundi In slightly more formal French, you can often use dès with times, especially in phrases such as dès maintenant.

- à partir de can also be used to mean "from" in the sense of "using ... as a basis/starting point/materials".