Entre Les Murs

Les Entretiens 2007

I attended a small conference for project managers yesterday.  It was organized by the Paris branch of the Project Management Institute, in a little conference space down near Les Halles.  The point for me was as much French lesson as professional development, and frankly the effort of following the speakers left me exhausted by lunch.  The fellow seated next to me at lunch lapsed into English for a while, for which I was grateful, but other than that I spent the whole day trying to think in French.  A week or so like yesterday would accomplish what the last year and a half of classes has failed to do.


I have gained some sympathy for the Quebec drafters of bill 101.  It surprises me how much English there is in daily life here.  Advertisements in magazines often use the English slogans and tag lines, with a little asterisk and the French in a footnote.  English music is as common on the radio as French.  And anglicisms in the language are more frequent than the odd French word we insert at home.

In professional life it's even more prevalent.  Yesterday wasn't the first time I've been to presentations where the slides, produced for a general business audience, were in English while the speaker addressed them in French.  Or mostly French: words like "outsourcing", "management", "reporting", "coaching", "business case", "stakeholder", and "best practices" (all heard yesterday) are not translated but have simply been adopted.  And that's not even mentioning all the computer words that have no French translation.  If it were my language, I'd be concerned for its future.

posted 29.3.07