Maybe Charlie isn't far wrong. Check out Sawyer's file that Locke was reading. A quick glance and you'll notice that the top document is in French. I'm also hearing, from those more advanced speakers, that it looks like a police report of some kind. Indeed, I tried translating gendarmerie to little avail, but putting it through Wikipedia brought home interesting information about the French military national police force. Here's some links:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Gendarmerie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendarmerie
So it seems like Sawyer had some involvement with these guys, maybe he visited France for a time? Could be interesting, maybe show Shannon in the background or something (she lived there for a while, right?).
If I can get any more/better translation tidbits, I'll update.
