Beautiful language it is, I never understood why every foreign word in French has to be recreated. Otan, Sida, Ordinateur, and now I have found a new depth of this...
French is one of two co-equal official languages of the North Atlantic Treaty, and OTAN is just as much the official acronym of the organization as NATO is.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Strasbourg%E2%80%93Kehl_s...
Those acronyms in particular, SIDA and OTAN, are also the proper ones in Spanish and Portuguese.
It's not a translation, it's the official acronym based directly on the official name just as much as the English one is.
The Treaty and the Organization have two co-equal official languages, English and French.
> There are probably (?) more German-speaking NATO citizens
Probably, but the official languages, names, and acronyms were all set when the organization was founded, while Germany was still under occupation by the WWII Allies.
(Well, outside of CS, GMT is much more common than UTC here in the UK. But I'd put that more down to self-centricism and not having a different term for our own non-Summer time than translating the acronym (which of course it isn't, and came first).)
UTC isn't French. It's also not English. It's a deliberate compromise between the obvious acronym for the English phrase (CUT) and that for the corresponding French (TUC).
Though to me it reads more as English, and specifically American and military, because “Universal Time, Coordinated” follows a common pattern in US military naming, when what would normally be the first leading adjective instead becomes a trailing modifier.
CD came out and they were just called 'CD' in France (pronounced 'cédé') or, if using the actual words "disque compact".
Then CDROM came out, and they were just and only called 'CDROM' in France, but obviously pronounced in French so that it is pronounced 'cédérom'.
The Académie Francaise then woke up and decided that 'CDROM' was an outrageous English acronym and that a proper French word should be used. And they came up with... cédérom. You could not make this up even in a Monty Python skit.
> I never understood why every foreign word in French has to be recreated. Otan, Sida, Ordinateur,
These are not recreated. These are just acronyms and words in another language than English...
For a counter example, lots of sports federations have French-based acronym names, and no one translates them. Like Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) or FIFA (federation internationale de football association).
For the latter, an extra twist is calling it ‘football’, not ‘ballon de pied’ or sth...
I see USSR much more often CCCP, HIV more often than VIH...
Not every often, but LSD is a notable example: the S is for "Säure", German for "acid".
Also names of foreign political parties: the full names of political parties aren't usually very informative, so expanding the acronym, translating it into English, and then making a new acronym would be ... unhelpful.
Edit: Of course it's not CCCP; it's СССР, or SSSR!
> ISO gives this explanation of the name: "Because 'International Organization for Standardization' would have different acronyms in different languages (IOS in English, OIN in French), our founders decided to give it the short form ISO. ISO is derived from the Greek isos, meaning equal. Whatever the country, whatever the language, the short form of our name is always ISO."[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for...
It's a weird thing that started a long time ago, they want to keep french "french". It works to some extent and it's nice to be able to use "native" words rather than anglicism.
See this for example: https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2010/03/30/tout-un-ra...
French people will say ONU, OTAN or URSS because they're not tied to any English-speaking country, but they'll still use FBI or CIA, for example.
Outside of government forms, you basically never see 'courriel,' and you hear 'PC' way more than 'ordinateur'
I do love the word 'internaut' though.