Say goodbye to words like ” esports “ at ” cloud gaming “, hello “competitive video game” and “cloud video game”: government officials in France need to use French vocabulary for video game jargon, which is dominated by English.
Among the words that need to be forcibly adopted by civil servants are: stream who becomes player-hostwhere live player-host (instavideographer, in Quebec), and gamer which becomes players and professional players. Free-to-play was replaced by free game access. This guide, published in the Official Journal in France, is part of the French Academy’s efforts to prevent the deterioration of Molière’s language in some sectors. According to the Ministry of Culture, which gave an interview to the AFP, the vocabulary of the video game industry is particularly full of Anglicisms, which makes barriers to understanding for people who don’t play video games or don’t understand much English. For each English expression, the specialists try to see if there is already a French term circulating, on video game sites or special magazinesso that select a translation that is already in use, underlined in the French Ministry of Culture. Note that the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) published the first lexicon in French of words in the video game industry in 2012. The latter was revisited recently in partnership with the Guilde du jeu vidéo du Québec.
Source: Radio-Canada
