In the Wall Street Journal today, this article on how English IT neologisms get “officially” translated into French, a process that can take upwards of 18 months!
The article explains how a task force recently spent 18 months on the term “cloud computing” — coming up with “informatique en nuage” and going back to the drawing board because the proposed term was “meaningless” in French. Another proposal (one I rather like, actually) was CIEL (Capacité Informatique en Ligne or online computing capability), deemed too far-fetched, as in “How did we get from clouds to sky?”
The example is an interesting one, in fact, because it raises the question of how far is too far when “adapting” terms to a new target language and culture. The second proposal definitely would have earned my vote. It is descriptive of the underlying meaning and can be shortened to an acronym, and the French language is replete with acronyms that can be pronounced as words (here it was CIEL, which means “sky” in French). The only “fault” is that it fails to calque the original phrase in English by using the word “nuage” (cloud), a practice I actually try to avoid in my own translations.
So don’t look for “informatique en nuage” in any French dictionary just yet…In the meantime, visit this guide to IT neologisms for a chuckle.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I don’t know French but I got the ideas. In Chinese, as well as in possibly other languages, the direct translation of “Cloud” and “Computing” will be adopted. If the direction translation of “Cloud” and “Computing” is meaningless in Chinese, so it is in English. It is just a name and not a summary. And a name doesn’t have to contain a lot of information. Why shouldn’t French do the same, just using the French word for “Cloud” and “Computing”?