France Mandates Replacements for English Gaming Words | Hacker News Reader

France Mandates Replacements for English Gaming Words

businessinsider.com

16 pointstosh28 comments

> France's culture ministry told AFP that the French terms would help French people understand the gaming industry better than if all the terms remained in English.

The irony of this is that word's like 'cloud gamer' don't mean a damn thing to native english speakers who don't have the context to understand them. The reason why French isn't the Lingua Franca in this domain is because France accounts for only about 2% of the global video game market. Termes de l'art are forged in the context they are created in.

If dystopian fiction has taught me anything, its that eventually we will all just speak some kind of pidgin, and I think that's très bien.

Actually "joueur dans les nuages" is the exact translation in French... so it doesn't mean anything !!! However "Cloud gamer" is really specific to IT

I learned German pre-internet, but with the onset of the pandemic, I started watching German media (mostly the news). A good deal of "office English" is incorporated into the language, but nothing prepared me for the ZDF Heute Show (a German news/satire program, reminiscent of The Daily Show). The German-English wordplay is sometimes pretty funny, but presumes a high degree of English proficiency (which I found surprising for a state public television station).

I wonder how the Germans feel about this. The closest I've seen to irritation with English was some good-natured ribbing of someone who coined "registrieren" rather than say "abonnieren" (a French loanword).

On the other hand, I thought German has its own (at least slang) terms for all things video games, but checking Duden, I find "Das Streaming"?!

The French respect their language. Furthermore, the French feel that their language is sufficient to express all that needs to be expressed.

I will admit that when I hear people using English terms and even phrases in my language, I fear that is another nail in killing the language. I could totally see proposals to discard the language after a significant portion of ideas could no longer be expressed in the language.

Perhaps they respect it too much. When government is used to control what words people are allowed to use and say, all talk of virtue is meaningless.

I don't think they control anything. They suggest new terms and publish guidelines on how French should be (according to them) used but their resolutions aren't binding.

From the article:

> Government workers are required to use the new terms, the AFP reported.

That doesn't seem too horrible to me. The terms they've chosen seem clumsy to me (though I haven't spoken much French since college), but they're unlikely to be picked up by journalists or people-on-the-street unless they do promote some clarity.

Ehhh the US Federal government built slack bot that enforces genderless language [0] - this seems pretty mild in comparison

0: https://18f.gsa.gov/2016/01/12/hacking-inclusion-by-customiz...

Oh, so it enforces genderless language? So one mention of "guys" and, what, you're banned at least? Or does a swarm of federal agents show up at your house and drag you off to the progressive thought crime gulags? Oh woe are we, that we've sunk to such tyranny.

I mean, surely it's not just one slack bot for a single team that only encouraged (not enforced) gender inclusive language, right? It's gotta be something pretty extreme, probably cooked up by the woke Twitter mobs who've infiltrated our government!

They're only authoritative as far as governmental output goes, which is perfectly fine : the government's language should be consistent across the board.

Maybe it'd be better if everybody used English

Or maybe not? hard to say

The one-language world has been a recurring dream over the centuries, but it's only in the past century that we've been really verging on a truly universal lingua franca. But even now most people in the world still don't speak standard American or UK English with native fluency, so I think regional languages will be stickier than some people give them credit for.

Minority languages will continue to die out, but that's not necessarily the fault of English (except in some cases, e.g. Irish or Native American languages). Rather, existing regional languages crowd out minority ones.

  > Maybe it'd be better if everybody used English

How about everybody just speak Arabic or Chinese? And we can all pray towards Mecca while we're at it, that would guarantee world peace, no?

One single world culture, no diversity, right? Just so long as it's _your_ culture?

What do you mean by "your"? English is not my native language

I just believe that learning so popular language like english brings so many benefits, that it'd be interesting to see what would happen if whole world used one language

I meant the proverbial "your". Out of curiosity, what is your language? Is it tied to your local culture as well? I'm honestly interested in hearing an alternative point of view.

My native language is Polish and yea, my local culture is full of it.

Meanwhile english gives so many opportunities to learn, to advance in career, to explore stuff, etc. that I'd be hard without it.

> I will admit that when I hear people using English terms and even phrases in my language, I fear that is another nail in killing the language. I could totally see proposals to discard the language after a significant portion of ideas could no longer be expressed in the language.

I remember two colleagues conversing in a foreign language in the office (Arabic I believe?) and telling them I almost understood what they were talking about since so much of it was English technical jargon. They explained to me there is simply no translation for these words in their language.

I commend the French for making the effort of defining words for these new concepts. What I wonder is if some English terms will stick long enough to be known, in a few centuries perhaps, as "Americanisms".

English itself borrowed heavily from French centuries ago (and some authors even tried to create a version of English free of Latin, Greek and French influences; it's worth a read [0])

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_English

To the typical Anglophone, the French approach to managing French can seem absurdly authoritarian - how presumptuous to tell people how they should speak. But I do have some sympathy for the concept of a language authority. French does at least have a definition of what French is. I expect French to maintain cultural continuity for longer than English, which is so freewheeling and absorptive that it feels we are destined for schism and mutual incomprehension in the long run. In English, nobody can tell us that our usage is wrong, and we have no North Star guiding us along a shared linguistic journey.

Before people say 'Hey that's can't be true'. It is (sorta):

> In America, the style of grammar used in academic, government, and professional situations is called Standard American English. There is no official government agency in the United States that makes rules for the English language. In fact, the United States does not even have an official language.

https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/who-makes-grammar-rule...

The only official language in any part of the UK is Welsh :)

> I expect French to maintain cultural continuity for longer than English, which is so freewheeling and absorptive that it feels we are destined for schism and mutual incomprehension in the long run

English in England is becoming more homogenous and comprehensible, not less. There's much more internal mobility, much more international mobility and more time is spent consuming mass media including media created in the USA.

I am ashamed… This is wrong at so many levels…. The English terms became standardized by industry acceptation not because some old guy said so. Translating them literally makes no sense.

let's not translate anything then, and let people use words from foreign languages, so native speakers can no longer understand or read their own language

their "streamer" translation is wrong as it is not related to gaming.

v2.0 of their translation table is needed.

it's not

if you are only streaming gaming, it's joueur en direct

for everything else it is "animateur en direct", they already use "animateur" for TV shows "animateur TV"

they make the distinction between the two

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/download/pdf?id=iGc45tbXV4OAS...

That was exactly my point: steamers are not streaming games only. Look at twitch, you have IRL, travel, makers...

So it is wrong.

you have reading issues? do you speak french? (i doubt)

if you stream IRL/travel/cooking, it is "animateur en direct"

if you only stream gaming, it is "joueur en direct"

if you if you stream a mix of everything it is "animateur en direct"

"animateur en direct" is a generic term for "streamer"

I did a term search on "streamer", in the now unavailable PDF document (or in the process of being modified/corrected/improved), and as far as I recall, the generic term "streamer" was related to gaming only in their table.

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