French official ICT vocabulary updated

French official ICT vocabulary updated

The Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France (= General Delegation for the French language and the languages of France) has published the latest version of its vocabulary recommendations for information and communication technologies (ICT), today’s Le Monde Informatique reports.

The Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France has been working since 1979 on a Gallicisation of the English language terms that populate the digital world. A new version of its recommendations for ICT vocabulary terms has just been published with several updates compared with the previous version released in 2009. The document contains 488 pages and can be downloaded free of charge as a PDF.

image of an entry from the Vocabulary
The Vocabulary’s entry for email address

The document brings together all the recommendations made in the last half century and published over the years in the French Official Journal. In theory, use of these terms is mandatory instead of English language terms, particularly in documents that have to be written by law in French (e.g. documents required for work in particular). After an introduction summarising the history and meaning of the work that has been completed, the main bulk of the document comprises a dictionary of recommended terms, with the entry for each word comprising not only its definition but the foreign equivalents to be excluded. The end of the vocabulary contains an index of both the French and foreign language terms.

This work could be regarded as a move to defend France’s “belle langue“. However, living languages are always enriched by contact with regional or foreign languages. The task of the vocabulary can be regarded rather as an effort to retain a consistent and fair mode of expression.

Author: Steve Woods

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