Article published In: The Journal of Internationalization and Localization
Vol. 9:1 (2022) ► pp.1–37
When French becomes Canadian French
The curious case of localizing COVID-19 terms with Microsoft Translator
Published online: 13 October 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/jial.22007.bow
https://doi.org/10.1075/jial.22007.bow
Abstract
In late 2020, the free online translation tool Microsoft Translator began to offer the option of translating into
“French (Canada)” as a target language, alongside the previously offered “French”. Using a list of ten COVID-19 terms previously
identified by Bowker, Lynne. 2020. “French-language COVID-19 terminology: International or localized?” Journal of Internationalization and Localization 7 (1/2): 1–27. as having different equivalents in Canadian French and
European French, we evaluate the ability of Microsoft Translator to localize these terms into the two varieties of French. The
findings indicate that while this tool does a good job of localizing the terms into Canadian French, it also uses a high number of
Canadian French terms when the target language is set to “French”. One potential reason for this may be that the corpus used to
train the tool for “French” contains a disproportionate number of examples from Canadian sources, and so there may be a problem of
bias where the tool is amplifying Canadian French in the machine translation output.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Data-driven approaches to MT
- 3.Method
- 3.1Testing for influence of geographic location or explicit contextual clues
- 3.2Experiment
- 4.Results
- 5.Discussion
- 6.Concluding remarks
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