The Commission for the Enrichment of the French Language has integrated new words into the French language to counter anglicisms. Problem, she sometimes offers erroneous translations, a sign that she did not understand the meaning of the words she was trying to translate.
Every year, the Commission d’enrichissement de la langue française makes people talk with official translations of commonly used English terms. This work is generally mocked on the internet since Internet users are often already used to English terms like “smartphone” and do not necessarily want to change their habits for translations like “ordiphone”. This is in fact an important work of the Commission, the objective of which is not so much the adoption by the general public, as to propose correct terms for our official or legal texts. The target is therefore above all our institutions so that they can continue to use French completely without resorting to Anglicisms.
Unfortunately, in the latest batch of new words, the Commission has visibly misunderstood certain terms and is therefore proposing… erroneous translations.
Errors
Thus, the term streamer has been officially translated into player, animator, live performer » or « player, live player “. If we can salute the inclusiveness, the translation does not really cover all of what a streamer. Indeed, it is increasingly common for a streamer on Twitch or other platforms not to play video games and to offer shows on a wide variety of topics. We can think of the French example of Backseat, a political program every Thursday hosted by Jean Massiet, or the programs that we can offer you on Frandroid’s Twitch channel (follow us !). Here, the Commission obviously failed to detect the broadening of the definition of the term, which in English is not limited to the field of video games.
More problematically, the Commission translated “ game as a Service »Ou GaaS en« video game on demand “. Here she confused two different areas and one can easily guess what she got wrong. “Video game on demand” probably refers video game services by subscription as Xbox Game Pass. However, these services are not GaaS. This term actually refers to game services, designed to offer players an experience over the long term and remuneration over time. Destiny, Fortnite or even World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV are examples of service games.
Not everything is to be thrown away
In the list of proposed translations, most correspond to correct translations. So the cloud gaming becomes “the cloud video game”, the DLCs are additional downloadable content (CTA), theearly access becomes early access and free-to-play video games in free access. The Commission was interested in very contemporary terms, thee-sport becomes a competitive video game, the hand tracking (for virtual reality) becomes hand tracking, and social games are social (online) games.
Those interested in a little more amusing terms will also find their accounts there. So we like the rigging which very aptly translates into “skeletonization” and the matchmakingtranslated as “player pairing”.
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