As part of its ongoing BRIDGE programme in Africa and funded through a grant from the Australian Government through AusAID International IDEA has developed a first draft of a French BRIDGE translation Glossary.
A meeting of French-speaking BRIDGE facilitators took place on 16 and 17 April at IDEA Accra office. A follow-up session took place between two of the facilitators on 25 April (after the 5-day French professional Development BRIDGE workshop organised by IDEA on the 20-24 April in Accra).
The objective of the meeting was to develop a unified French Translation glossary for BRIDGE and electoral terms that will be used for all future French translation exercises of BRIDGE resources.
The glossary team used existing IDEA, BRIDGE & ACE resources to build the glossary, and consulted as well databases from specialized French and Canadian linguistic institutions. All in all, a total of 130 BRIDGE terms and 350 electoral terms have been included in the Glossary. This is fairly exhaustive and will certainly greatly help future translation efforts. In several cases, more than one translation in French was presented as translations often vary with the context and also the geographical region (even between Francophone African countries, different terms are often used for the same activity / concept).
The purpose of the glossary is to become a resource to be used by translators to provide guidance in language use and to ensure a consistency of terminology in future translations. A similar glossary in Arabic has already been produced in 2008.
The Glossary will soon be available on the BRIDGE Website.
Alexandra Hovelacque, Dieudonné Tshiyoyo, Nicolas Garrigue and Ibrahima Niang
