CRITERIA

DEFINITION

EXAMPLES

METHOD

COMMENTS

Cultural neutrality

Property of a word in relation to how often it appears in the language in the context of culture.

Wine ('vin'), perfume ('parfum'), gastronomy ('gastronomie') and terms of diplomatic language are not culturally neutral in French.

So as to obtain a sample with the weakest variance coefficient, terms that have a cultural dimension are excluded.

Trans-linguistic homography

The spelling of a term in one language is identical to that of a term in another language. This concerns identical written forms as well as 'false friends'. It is possible to distinguish homographies with or without diacritical marks.

Example of an identical written form : casa in Spanish and Portugese means "house".

Examples of 'false friends': red in Spanish ("network"), "red" ;
hier in French ("yesterday") and hier in German("here").

Those terms having this characteristic (with or without diacritics) are not included in the sample.

Only those homographies between languages included in the study and/or with languages with a strong Internet presence (like German) are considered. To avoid the statistical risk of homography with foreign langages, words of less than four letters are not included.

Translinguistic homography with one of the elements of a compound.

Mardi gras in English

The results returned by search engines need to be checked to avoid this type of intrusion.

It is possible to deduct the score of the foreign forms.

Translinguistic homograpy of borrowed words

When there is accepted use of a word from another language.

Anglicisms like business, sandwich or software. Reciprocally, deja vu (homography of the French without diacriticals).

Borrowed words are not included in the sample.

Homography with an abbreviation

The number sept ("seven") with abbreviations of septembre (French) and especially September.

Avoid these terms.

We are able to reduce this to a certain extent by deciding to avoid words of less than four letters.

Homography with a common proper noun

Julio, "July" in Spanish, and the very common first name with the same significance.

Windows � as well as its original meaning it is the name of a software which is frequently cited on the Internet.

Reject terms in this category.

Translinguistic pseudo-homography

The written form of a word with a common spelling error corresponds to a term in another language.

Ambasador in Rumanian and ambassador in English.

The event is rejected only when the source language is English.

Non-equivalent meanings

Prix in French means both premio and precio (Spanish), price and prime (English).

Avoid these terms or, if possible, check them, taking into account of all the meanings which give an equivalent meaning in the languages, where necessary.

Non-equivalent morphosyntax: noun, verb

English, very different from the other languages studied from a syntaxical point of view, often has the same form for a noun and verb variant, equivalent in other respects to many forms of conjugation in the other languages.

Love in English is both a term which means "amour" (a noun in French) and the verb aimer (to love) : in its conjugation from the infinitive (preceded by 'to') and the indicative present (aime, aimes, aimons, aimez, aiment), etc.

Avoid these terms.

This characteristic of English caused us to reject a priori verbs.

Non-equivalent morphosyntax: adjectives and nouns

Adjectives, non-variable in English but varying accoring to gender and number in the other languages studied. Names generally vary only in number in the other languages, but vary according to case (nominative, genitive etc.) and determinative / non-determinative differences in Rumanian.

The English adjective yellow corresponds to amarillo / amarilla / amarillos / amarillas, in Spanish. The nouns instability / instabilities have the equivalent varients in Rumanian : instabilitate / instabilitatea / instabilitãþii / instabilitãþi / instabilitãþile / instabilitãþilor. (Variants without diacriticals are not included here).

Look to increase the number of variants of gender, number and case in the other languages, when there is a need for an equivalent term.

Semantic and lexic multicentrism

Where a language has more than one normative lexic-semantic centre.

In Spanish speaking countries, 'petrol' is called nafta or even gasolina. Americano, in certain Hispanophone countries does not have the same meaning as in others or Spain ('belonging to the continent as a a whole' or 'belonging to the US').

Look to increase the number of national or regional synonymical variants, where possible.

Orthographic multicentrism

When a language has more than one normative orthographic centre.

This is the case for Anglais and notably Portugese. Some terms are spelt differently in the US and the UK, (theater and theatre), in Portugal and Brazil (electricidade and eletricidade).

Look to increase the number of national spelling variants for their equivalents, where possible.