English Translation
Can you arrange for her to appear on this TV show?
arranger le coup = is not defined in any of my dictionaries. It appears to be used informally to mean to help someone by setting them up for something, maybe set up a date or in this case it could mean something like “fix the deal“, but for someone else. There seems to be a strong connotation of helping? On reverso.net, there are quite a few sentences using this phrase mostly meaning to set up someone on a romantic date.
I found this crossword puzzle clue where users suggested possible synonyms: https://www.fsolver.fr/mots-fleches/ARRANGERLECOUP
I’d be interested to hear how any of our native and fluent users define it.
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It’s not an expression that I use, and don’t remember having heard be user lately, but on a first impression, I’d say it’s more about fixing something that arranging it. For me, here, arranger le coup implies that something went array awry (probably because of her) and the speaker is asking a third person to fix the situation so that she appears on the tv show (and maybe even, as it was originally planned).
Then again, that’s already what “arranger” alone can mean (see definitions 2 and 10), so maybe this is a fixed expression that makes it mean something else…
I’ve found a couple of pages that seem to agree with the idea of fixing the situation; there is this exchange, about another sentence that also contains the expression.Then there is also this website (I didn’t know about it, but it seems to be a dictionary of colloquial french) that has an entry for this expression.
Also this might have been originally a sentence from Tatoeba (it’s a translation of a translation, so things get a bit wonky sometimes), but interestingly, the english version doesn’t use (anymore,at least) “arrange”, but rather “make it so”. I think this fits better the french translation; to my understanding, arrange is about organising (probably a meeting or directly, the show) where as “make it so”, implies changing things so that her appearance is possible, which could encompass the fixing of previous problems, as the french sentences implies.
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