法国人终于不再抵制英语

France Gives In to the Hashtag

法国人终于不再抵制英语

Cardinal Richelieu, the 17th century power behind the French throne, must be rolling in his grave after the stunning announcement that France is giving up the fight to keep English words out of the French language.

法国宣布将不再拒绝英语词汇进入法语，17世纪王朝实权人物黎塞留枢机主教(Cardinal Richelieu)泉下有知，恐怕要气活过来。

This sudden reversal of four centuries of French linguistic policy was issued by the minister of culture, Fleur Pellerin, who declared that France’s resistance to the incursion of English words was harming — rather than preserving — the language. “French is not in danger, and my responsibility as minister is not to erect ineffective barriers against languages but to give all our citizens the means to make it live on,” Ms. Pellerin told an audience assembled for the opening of French Language and Francophonie Week in March, acknowledging in one sentence both the futility and misguidedness of the battle.

这个由文化部长弗勒尔·佩尔兰(Fleur Pellerin)发布的惊人决定，猛然推翻了沿袭400年的法国语言政策，佩尔兰表示，抵抗英文词的入侵对法语非但起不到保护作用，反而有害。在3月的法语和法语人周(French Language and Francophonie Week)开幕式上发言的佩尔兰，用一句话承认了这场语言战斗的无谓与误导性：“法语并未陷入险境，作为部长，我的职责不是给语言筑起无效的壁垒，而是要让我们的全体公民都参与进来，从而维持它的生命力。”

“French is not in danger” is a remarkable assertion from the chief language guardian of the country that in 2006 fined the French subsidiary of General Electric Medical Systems more than 500,000 euros for issuing software manuals in English; that has officially banned the use of anglicisms for decades; and whose official determination to “keep French French” dates to King Louis XIII, who reigned from 1610 to 1643. Back then, of course, the task wasn’t so much to keep English out but to get control of the variations of French floating around and to decide what was to be codified as official French.

“法语并未陷入险境”的观点从法国最高语言捍卫者口中道出，是不同寻常的，在这个国家，通用电气医疗系统公司(General Electric Medical Systems)法国子公司曾在2006年因用英语发布软件说明书，被课以逾50万欧元(约合333万元人民币)的罚款;官方几十年来一直禁用英语词; “法语就是法语”这样的官方口径，最早可溯至1610到1643年在位的路易十三世时代。当然，那时候主要的工作不是抵制英语，而是对流传各地的法语变种加以控制，以确立一套官方法语规范。

Louis gave the job to his eager adviser, Cardinal Richelieu, who in 1635 founded the Académie Française to rule once and for all whether cheese would be spelled “fromage” or “formage,” formalize the diacritics — those accents that bedevil students of French to this day — and just generally, in the words of the academy’s charter, “clean the language of all the filth it has caught” and make French “pure [and] eloquent.”

路易十三把这项任务交给了跃跃欲试的黎塞留，此人1635年创立法兰西学院(Académie Française)，负责对奶酪应该是“fromage”还是“formage”这样的问题做出最终裁决，以及规范变音——也就是那些至今仍让法语学习者头疼不已的重音——此外，学院章程有这样的表述：它需要从总体上“把这门语言沾染的污秽清洗干净”，让法语“纯粹[而]传神”。

Nearly 400 years later the 40 “Immortels” of the French Academy, clad in velvet robes and Napoleonic bicornes for their annual meetings, continue to strive to meet this noble if elusive goal. But in recent decades the academy has been less concerned with what to include in French than with what to exclude: namely, English.

将近400年后，法兰西学院那40位身着天鹅绒长袍、头戴拿破仑式双角帽参加年会的“不朽者”(Immortel)，仍然在尽力履行这项高贵但又有些令人费解的使命。不过在近几十年里，学院最关心不是应该把什么包括到法语中，而是要把一门语言排除出去：那就是英语。

Most of the debate today centers on dealing with English technology terms such as “hashtag” and “cloud computing.” But in fact the backlash against English encroachment into French started in the pre-computer age, when officials became alarmed over the country’s infatuation with “le jogging” and eating “les cheeseburgers” on “le week-end.” Realizing that the academy, which as an advisory body has no legal standing, wasn’t doing all that super a job with keeping out “the filth,” France formed a commission on terminology in 1970. That was followed five years later by the Maintenance of the Purity of the French Language act, which introduced fines for the use of banned anglicisms, then in 1984 by the General Commission for the French Language, which in turn was followed by the 1994 Toubon Law, mandating the use of the French language in all official government publications, commercial contracts, and in advertisements, workplaces and public schools.

如今引起争议最多的是英语的科技术语，比如“hashtag”(标签)和“cloud computing”(云计算)。然而，这场抵制英语入侵的运动，在前电脑时代就已经开始，当时像“le week-end”(周末)去“le jogging”(慢跑)和吃“le cheeseburgers”(汉堡)这样的说法在国内很流行，引起了官方的警觉。作为一个顾问机构，法兰西学院是不具备法律资格的，在意识到它的“污秽”清理工作差强人意后，法国在1970年成立了一个术语委员会。五年后通过的《维护法语纯粹性》法案(Maintenance of the Purity of the French Language)规定，使用明令禁止的英语词会被课以罚款，而后是1984年法语总务委员会(General Commission for the French Language)成立，再之后是1994年的《都蓬法》(Toubon Law)，规定所有政府正式出版物、商业合同以及广告、工作场所和公立学校等场合都必须使用法语。

Yet despite these many laws and commissions (at least 20 that govern the French language) there’s still that vexing “hashtag” (or as the Ministry of Culture would have you call it — at least up until a couple of weeks ago — mot-dièse) problem. The ministry relies on specialized terminology commissions for finding French replacements for new words of foreign influence, and in theory the task is straightforward: take a foreign term such as “Wi-Fi” and come up with a French equivalent other than “le Wi-Fi.” Unfortunately, the tendency of the French to be verbose works greatly to their disadvantage, especially in the Twitter age. The recommended replacement for “Wi-Fi” (which the French so adorably pronounce “wee-fee”) was the mouthful “accès sans fil à l’Internet,” literally “access without wire to the Internet.” Which is why you see signs for “Wi-Fi” all over France.

尽管有这么多的法律和委员会(管辖法语的委员会至少有20个)，却还是无法摆脱讨厌的“hashtag”(或者根据文化部要求，你得说mot- dièse——这个情况至少到几周前还未改变)。文化部需要靠专门的术语委员会来为外来新词找到法语替代项，理论上讲这是个很简单的任务：找到一个像 “Wi-Fi”这样的外来词，想出一个法语中的对应词，当然不能用“le Wi-Fi”。不幸的是，法语趋于冗繁的特点对它们很不利，尤其是在Twitter时代。政府建议“Wi-Fi”(法国人把这个词读作“wee- fee”，十分可爱)的法语对应是“accès sans fil à l’Internet”，直译就是“无线接入互联网”。这就是为什么你在法国到处看到牌示上还是写着“Wi-Fi”。

I suspect that the French don’t realize that “Wi-Fi” doesn’t even make sense in English. The term exists only because someone in a manufacturer’s marketing department, having been given the assignment to come up with a word or phrase short enough for a sticker on a computer to describe a wireless network connection, was old enough to remember playing his Charlie Parker albums on his spiffy “Hi-Fi.” Yet it is precisely this past history of near-obsessive adherence to doctrine that makes Ms. Pellerin’s announcement so shocking.

我估计法国人还不知道，“Wi-Fi”在英语里也是莫名其妙的。这个词的存在无非是因为，某个制造商的市场部的某个人接到任务，要想出一个描述无线网络连接的词或短语，这个词要足够短，短到能做成标签贴在电脑上，而这个人又足够老，老到还记得当年用炫酷的“Hi-Fi”音响放他的查理·帕克 (Charlie Parker)唱片。然而，恰恰是这种历史上对律条的近乎执迷的坚持，让佩尔兰的发言显得格外惊人。