French Localisation & Cultural Reference

Papeʻete houses the Assemblée de la Polynésie française, whose ordinances appear in a formal French calibrated on metropolitan practice. Under the organic law of 27 February 2004, reo Tahiti counts as a foundation of Polynesian cultural identity. A translator on a territorial file leaves Tahitian toponyms and institutional titles unaltered, glossing them at first mention for an audience outside the territory.

In Nouméa the Académie des langues kanak, provided for by the 1998 Nouméa Accord, publishes orthographies for the Kanak languages of New Caledonia. A localisation team drafting for the Congrès cites the French title beside the Kanak title. Caldoche vocabulary, common in speech across the territory, belongs to commercial material. An official notice addressed to Kanak communities omits it.

There are three customary kingdoms in Wallis and Futuna, left in place by the statute of 29 July 1961. On ʻUvea the Lavelua and his council conduct customary business in fakaʻuvea. The territorial administration at Mata-Utu writes in French. A bilingual notice therefore gives the chieftaincy in fakaʻuvea and the service in French, with the customary title in the leading position.

Divided between the kingdoms of Alo and Sigave, Futuna presents a translator with two chiefly hierarchies. The titles Tuʻi Agaifo and Tuʻi Sigave appear in fakafutuna throughout the French text, because a French paraphrase would flatten the rank attached to them. Kava protocol vocabulary and the forms of chiefly address remain in fakafutuna for that reason.

Writing correct French begins with the accent. Because dès réception fixes an obligation at delivery while des réceptions names a series of parties, a grave accent dropped in typesetting alters the obligation in the clause. The cédille has a narrower job, softening the c when a or o follows. Since the Conseil supérieur de la langue française issued the rectifications of 1990, a project file also states the house choice between the reformed and the traditional spellings.

Once a drafter adopts the registre soutenu, the sentences lengthen and the vocabulary narrows toward formal usage. Our style sheet states the degree of formality at the head of the project, because a decree recast in plain administrative French loses its force as an instrument. That decision shows in the verb as well, with the present indicative preferred to the conditional in a legal instrument.

French institutional titles resist translation, because the office behind a title has no counterpart in Commonwealth practice. Our terminologists keep haut-commissariat and congrès in French and add an English explanation in parentheses. A file anglicising the office name leaves the client unable to locate the source text in the Journal officiel, which indexes the French title.

Most places in the collectivities answer to two names, a French form and an indigenous form. Our practice puts the endonym first and the exonym in support, because a community’s own name has priority on the page. A cadastral extract reverses that order, however, since the cadastre uses the French form. The gloss inverts as well, with the indigenous name in parentheses.

Gender and number govern the French adjective and the past participle. A mismatched ending gives the page away as foreign drafting, because a native writer does not produce that error. Our proofreaders audit concord clause by clause, with particular attention to the participle after avoir, whose agreement changes with the position of the object.

What separates an arrêté of the haut-commissariat from a public health circular is the formality. The arrêté builds the long subordinated period expected of a legal instrument. The circular uses short sentences for people with no legal training. Our editors keep the two voices apart in the style sheet, since a client sending an arrêté and a circular to the printer will otherwise receive one voice for two purposes.

Choosing the sanctioned French term means consulting the Commission d’enrichissement de la langue française, whose lists appear in the Journal officiel de la République française and in the FranceTerme database. Those terms bind French public bodies, the services of the haut-commissariat in Papeʻete included. A terminologist on a public-sector file consults FranceTerme and drops the loose anglicism borrowed by a marketing draft.

The Fare Vānaʻa has fixed reo Tahiti vocabulary since 1972, coining Tahitian equivalents for administrative and technical French. A defensible glossary entry therefore lists the French term from FranceTerme beside the Tahitian term from the Fare Vānaʻa. If the two bodies have not converged, our terminologists mark the entry as open and cite the source of the two proposals.

It is the nasal vowels and the liaison system that set French apart from the Polynesian languages of the region, whose consonant and vowel inventories exclude them. A speaker of français calédonien reduces certain final consonants under Kanak influence. A listener trained on Paris radio hears that reduction as an error. Our casting notes specify New Caledonian talent for a New Caledonian script.

Français polynésien takes its rhythm from reo Tahiti, with an intonation rising through the phrase toward an even close. A flat continental delivery sounds foreign to a Papeʻete audience. Our voice director annotates the contours on the script and rehearses them with the speaker in the booth.

Speakers have borrowed in two directions since church and school brought French to ʻUvea and Futuna. A writer drops a French loanword into a fakaʻuvea sentence, and a fakaʻuvea term into the French of a parish notice. A transcriber schooled only on continental audio mishears the blend. Our transcribers mark the loanword in its fakaʻuvea spelling and note the French source in the margin.

A recording session takes talent resident in the territory. A standard frame deploys a native speaker for clerical narration. An authority frame pairs that speaker with a dialect coach and tokenises the character voices for reuse. Our voice recording sessions apply that second arrangement to a multi-part campaign.

It falls to the typesetter to replace the imported vertical marks with guillemets, set with a narrow no-break space inside the pair. The space belongs next to the quoted phrase. Without it, the guillemets close on the word like an English quotation. Our house template stores that space as a non-breaking character.

French setting spaces the high punctuation as well. A compositor inserts a narrow no-break space to the left of the colon and of the question mark. English practice omits that space. Our proof stage flags the two marks on the galley and lists them in the delivery note.

A French figure uses a comma at the decimal and a narrow space at the thousands. The string 1 500,75 gives one thousand five hundred units and seventy-five hundredths. An English 1,500.75 inverts the two marks. A price or a coordinate mistaken on this point voids a contract clause.

On a French form the day precedes the month. The string 04/08 dates a document to the fourth of August. An English convention would place it in April. A customs declaration taken that way releases a consignment on the wrong date. French title capitalisation differs too, as a book title takes a capital on the opening word and on proper nouns. Our typesetters reset these conventions when a client supplies an English layout.

An appellation d’origine protégée names a place as much as a product. A translated appellation misdescribes the goods, the protected name and the region of origin being inseparable. Our consultants leave the appellation in French and add a gloss for the Pacific buyer, with the region of origin spelled out in it.

English cooking vocabulary stops short of confit, a slow cooking in fat. A paraphrase reduces the dish to a list of ingredients. A resort menu in French Polynesia therefore keeps its culinary terms of art in French. Our editors set the French term on the plate line and the English explanation underneath. Reo Tahiti terms take that treatment too, with poisson cru placed beside ʻia ota.

Hospitality French softens a request through the vouvoiement paired with the conditional. A concierge phrases a request to a guest in the conditional. The vous form applies across the whole exchange, including the printed card in the room. English hospitality writing lacks that grammar. Our writers rebuild the courtesy through modal verbs and a fuller salutation.

Literary adaptation is a different commission. A French author brought into English for a Pacific audience needs a translator willing to reconstruct the sentence rhythm. The plain sense by itself leaves the prose flat. Our literary editor compares the two texts line by line and logs the departures from literal sense in a translator’s note.

Francophonie

The institutional community of French-speaking peoples and administrations, from the Métropole out to the Pacific collectivities.

Métropole

Continental France, the reference point for overseas administrative French.

Pays d’outre-mer

The designation given to French Polynesia by the organic law of 27 February 2004, which sets the formal level of its official prose.

Registre soutenu

The elevated form of French reserved for legal instruments and state correspondence.

Français calédonien

The regional French of New Caledonia, inflected by Kanak languages and by long-established Caldoche speech.

Français polynésien

The regional French of French Polynesia, marked by the rhythms and loanwords of reo Tahiti.

Toponymie

The agreed nomenclature of place names across the territories, indigenous and French forms recorded together.

Exonyme et endonyme

The outside name for a place or a language, kept apart from the community’s own name for it. Respectful usage leads with the endonym.