October 15, 2009, 8:23 am
It’s Mysterious in English, Too
by Henry Woodbury
Filed under: Current Events, Language, Technology
To translate the English term for computing resources that can be accessed on demand on the Internet, a group of French experts had spent 18 months coming up with “informatique en nuage,” which literally means “computing in cloud.”
France’s General Commission of Terminology and Neology — a 17-member group of professors, linguists, scientists and a former ambassador — was gathered in a building overlooking the Louvre to approve the term.
“What? This means nothing to me. I put a ‘cloud’ of milk in my tea!” exclaimed Jean Saint-Geours, a French writer and member of the Terminology Commission.
“Send it back and start again,” ordered Etienne Guyon, a physics professor on the commission.
And so they have.
My brother reports that the Japanese have no such compulsions. By email he writes:
Japanese borrow English terminology with such carefree abandon that at times even I wonder sometimes why they didn’t use the Japanese equivalent. Though there are so many homophones in Japanese that it can be very convenient to have words whose meanings are confined to a specific context. The English “out,” for example, is used widely in sports: an “out” in baseball, a ball that is “out” in tennis, the “out nine” (and “in nine”) of a golf course.
“Cloud computing” in Japanese is “kuroudo konpuutingu”.
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