The francization of the vocabulary of a sport is a long process. The snowboarding one is just beginning the process.
And if you were told that you had attended a ” cab triple cork eighteen hundred weddle would you be impressed or just perplexed?
The repertoire of snowboarding masters includes several dozen different tricks that can be combined and chained in the air to the delight of spectators. These figures all have often intriguing or amusing names, such as ” roast beef », « McTwist », « rodeo flip ” and ” duck foot “, but apparently only in English, if we are to believe their authors or the experts, even French-speaking ones.
“These names sometimes go back to the beginning of the sport. Some were borrowed from skateboarding, which had started long before. Others come from those who invented the figures. That’s what everyone knows and calls them in snowboarding. We are talking about an international sport”, explains Maxime Hénault, the analyst of the snowboarding competitions at the Beijing Games on Radio-Canada. “Many of these terms would sound bad in French. I don’t see myself, for example, talking about a “tail hold” when a girl makes a tail grab. »
And then, unlike other disciplines such as freestyle skiing, there would be too many figures to translate, he continues. “If we just look at the types of sockets (grab), there are, for example, a good twenty. It is the same for the different types of rotations. And he keeps inventing new ones. »
No choice, according to Radio-Canada
Maxime Hénault knows a lot about the subject. In addition to having practiced the sport for years as a professional, he is the owner of a specialized school and has trained champions such as Sébastien Toutant, Maxime Parrot, Laurie Blouin and Mark McMorris. Failing to translate the names of the tricks into French, he promises to explain to viewers their characteristics, degree of difficulty and value in the eyes of the judges.
This solution was found in conjunction with the Crown corporation. “Radio-Canada refers in French to the technical terms of sports and disciplines when they exist in French and when they are recognized by the sports community on an international scale”, declared by email to the Duty a spokesperson, Marie Tétreault. What’s more, several figures were named by their creators themselves and “are not translatable with all due respect to the athletes who created them and the informed public”.
These rules do not seem to apply, however, to the Radio-Canada news website, which reported Maxence Parrot’s victory in the freestyle snowboarding event acquired on Sunday in China thanks in particular to a ” triple corkscrew 1620 degrees” perfectly successful on his last jump.
The example of hockey
These justifications do not shock Benoît Melançon, professor and expert on the links between language, sport and culture in the Department of French-language literature at the University of Montreal. On the contrary.
“It takes time to francize the lexicon of a sport. The fact that snowboarding is still young, that its repertoire is not yet complete, that everything happens largely in English and that it is a sport that has rapidly gone global with the help of social media makes all this more difficult to Frenchify quickly. »
The expert cites the example of French in hockey. Popular memory has retained that for Francophones in Canada, it was the journalist and advertiser René Lecavalier who helped to francize the vocabulary. But in fact, it was a job that had been started long before him, at the beginning of the last century, by specialized journalists who wanted to address their readers in their own language. This effort has also received help from institutions, such as the Société du parle français du Canada or Radio-Canada, which have offered lexicons.
“We did it by trial and error. The result was not always pretty or definitive,” explains Mr. Melançon. Who remembers, for example, that we have already proposed, over the years, to call hockey “hiccup”, the stick “gouret”, the puck “galine” and the all-star team “team of have”? The same exercise was done in parallel for baseball, called “base ball game”, and where the receiver was a “gobeur” and a ground ball, a “grazing hit” or a “rabbit”.
It’s not true that some things are impossible to translate. Everything translates. It’s about putting effort, imagination and daring to try things.
At that time, “Quebecers found themselves in a context of linguistic insularity and sought to translate into French the vocabulary of sports in which no other Francophone in the world was interested. All this was done very slowly in a very specific place, notes the author, among other things in books: The eyes of Maurice Richard. A cultural history and Puck tongue. It’s very different from these new sports which are spreading very quickly in the world at the same time as they continue to be invented. »
time and will
But again, the same question arises, he continues. Are there communicators and institutions seeking to francize the vocabulary? Verification made, the Office québécois de la langue française offers a French vocabulary for several winter Olympic sports, including snowboarding, while the Canadian Snowboard Federation offers a hybrid version. It is suggested, for example, to replace the McTwist by “McVrille”, duck foot by “duck”, rodeo flip by “rodeo” and the famous tail grab by “heel grip”.
“It’s not true that some things are impossible to translate. Everything translates. It’s about putting effort, imagination and daring to try things, underlines Benoît Melançon. If we were able to translate into French the vocabulary of hockey, baseball, tennis, car racing, and almost all the summer and winter Olympic sports, we should be able to propose solutions to Frenchify the new sports. »
“All of this takes time, of course, and cannot reasonably be done overnight. Time, but also willpower. »