Relève le barre

We nipped out this morning for coffee and a pastry and noticed this sign en route.

I said to Brian that I thought it was to advise that the maire would be taking water meter readings next week. I didn’t know exactly what it meant, but from what I did know this seemed a fair translation. He asked me if I knew what relève meant, which I didn’t. So a quick look at our translate app revealed it meant ‘relief’. Which then didn’t seem to make sense of my translation. So he looked up ‘relève de’ which means ‘succession’, so ‘relève de famille’, means family succession. So again, it did not make sense of my translation. So this time he looked up ‘relève des compteurs’. Voila! it means ‘meter readings’. He then mistakenly typed in ‘releve’ (without a grave accent) and got ‘raise’. So as a joke he typed ‘relève le barre’, (this time correctly with a grave accent) and that translated to ‘raise the bar’. So, it seems, relève can mean relief, succession, raise or reading (at least, but there may be others examples!).

I think we need to understand the use of this a bit more, but for now it’s a good example that when translating a sentence, it needs to be as a whole sentence, as words on their own can often have totally different meanings when taken out of context.