Great post. I loved that I heard part of this discussion first hand. Is it contempt for institutionalisation that the youth are displaying or indifference toward authority?
Awesome read, Joel. Absolutely loved it, and glad to have been of some help!
A few notes I wanted to share:
1. To answer your unanswered question: We do abbreviate words often, probably more than English even. The difference with English is that most of these abbreviations are just not consider "French" and rather slang. Still, not a single French person doesn't abbreviate words when speaking. (A bit more on that below)
2. I had no idea French was spoken faster than English. I suppose our way of mumbling words together is part of the reason (for instance: "est-ce-que" just sounds like "eske" and "il y a" sounds like "ya"). This being said, the words suggested by the Academie Francaise, are just incredibly longer to pronounce because they also don't have "mumblable" (pardon my French) syllables.
2. Another problem with the translations is that their meaning is unclear for everybody, almost more than the English versions. The word "en nuage" in the translation of "cloud-gaming" actually makes no sense in French because it's too literal. In the end, people will have to look up the French versions as much, if not more, than the commonly-used English ones. The French version of "streamer" also forgets that not all streamers play games.
All this being said, I do agree the way this has been reported in the news is too negative. The idea of making these terms more understandable to French speakers makes sense but a mixture of English and French would have been the best option in my opinion. "Cloud-gaming" could have been "jeu vidéo sur le cloud" because "cloud" is the most known way to express stuff on the cloud.
Sorry for the ramble and, thanks for making me spend time thinking and researching about this topic!
Great post. I loved that I heard part of this discussion first hand. Is it contempt for institutionalisation that the youth are displaying or indifference toward authority?
Awesome read, Joel. Absolutely loved it, and glad to have been of some help!
A few notes I wanted to share:
1. To answer your unanswered question: We do abbreviate words often, probably more than English even. The difference with English is that most of these abbreviations are just not consider "French" and rather slang. Still, not a single French person doesn't abbreviate words when speaking. (A bit more on that below)
2. I had no idea French was spoken faster than English. I suppose our way of mumbling words together is part of the reason (for instance: "est-ce-que" just sounds like "eske" and "il y a" sounds like "ya"). This being said, the words suggested by the Academie Francaise, are just incredibly longer to pronounce because they also don't have "mumblable" (pardon my French) syllables.
2. Another problem with the translations is that their meaning is unclear for everybody, almost more than the English versions. The word "en nuage" in the translation of "cloud-gaming" actually makes no sense in French because it's too literal. In the end, people will have to look up the French versions as much, if not more, than the commonly-used English ones. The French version of "streamer" also forgets that not all streamers play games.
All this being said, I do agree the way this has been reported in the news is too negative. The idea of making these terms more understandable to French speakers makes sense but a mixture of English and French would have been the best option in my opinion. "Cloud-gaming" could have been "jeu vidéo sur le cloud" because "cloud" is the most known way to express stuff on the cloud.
Sorry for the ramble and, thanks for making me spend time thinking and researching about this topic!