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Try reading with a French accent. It becomes much more coherant once you someone speaking with an accent.

Here's a slightly better translation.

A Frenchman prepares to attempt to break the sound barrier in freefall

The French parachutist Michel Fournier is preparing to make a free fall of more than 40,000 metres above the great plains of Canada, with the intention of becoming the first man to break the sound barrier during freefall, his spokesperson indicated Thursday.

Eleven months after having had to put off attempts till 2003, due to bad weather conditions, this veteran army commander, 59 years old, has set up his headquarters on a balloon launch site in a remote corner of Saskatchewan, right in the middle of Canada.

"The jump will be occuring fairly soon", his spokesperson Diane de Robiano said over the telephone. "All the equipment is ready, they're just waiting for calm weather", which could occur later this weekend, she added.

To make this achievement a reality, Fournier counts on being able to ascend using a helium balloon to a height of 40 km above ground level, from which he will throw himself into the air, hoping to achieve in 20 seconds a speed of 1.5 km/h, thus breaking the sound barrier. At 1000 metres above the ground, he will open his parachute to land.

This "grand jump", calculated to last 6 minutes and 25 seconds, will allow him to break 4 world records at the same time: the longest freefall, the fastest freefall, the parachute jump from the highest altitude and the highest altitude achieved by a human being in a balloon.

The Frenchman, who's been preparing for nearly 15 years for this jump, wasn't lucky last year. The jump team had to interrupt its preparations three times due to the whims of the weather, without counting another time caused by a light technical incident.

They had to wait three weeks, right up until the meterological window for the jump closed on the 20th of September, skewering the project completely.

"He went into debt because of that, and it was a very big problem for him, but lots of people have helped him out financially", Ms de Robiano assured us.

They had hoped to be able to make up for this in May, another time that was propitious for the jump due to wind levels, but one of the team members suffered a cardiac event, setting back the attempt to the end of August or the beginning of September. To reduce the risks of the jump within the confines of the stratosphere, the parachutist plans to jump vertically so as to avoid as much as possible being knocked off course by the jet stream, which blows between an altitude of 7000 and 12000 metres.

No that didn't help - and I had French in High School - at the time that was the only foreign language offered - and we were required to take a foreign language.