The Advocate
The ever-industrious Office québécois de la langue française has published a new vocabulary guide to equip consumers and the Quebec food industry with French-language terms and words related to food preservation.
The guide — entitled “Des denrées bien gardées: Vocabulaire de la conservation des aliments,” which awkwardly translates to “Well-Kept Food: Vocabulary of Food Conservation” — includes 90 key terms of new or recent French-language coinages often used in food processing, nutritional information labels and home food preservation and fermentation.
As the guide explains: “From external parameters to treatments carried out on the food itself, many strategies are put in place to ensure that foods retain their safety as well as their organoleptic and nutritional properties.”
Of course, that explanation is a translation of what the guide says. And for those who speak plain English, “organoleptic” refers to “relating to qualities of a substance that stimulate the sense organs, such as odour, colour, taste and texture of a food.”
“Food preservation techniques are varied and have become more refined over time,” reads the guide’s brief introduction, without pausing to add that this process of refinement has presumably occurred in an English-only environment.
The guide attempts to insert a little francization.
The curious can consult the 40-page guide at the OQLF’s website. While many of the translations are straightforward: “food additive” is rendered as “additif alimentaire” and “enzyme” is wisely translated as “enzyme.”
Other terms show great consideration for the variations of the French and English language, while others are touchingly poetic.
For instance “smart packaging,” used in English to describe packaging designed to collect and display data on the condition of its contents, becomes more noble in the OQLF’s preferred translation of “emballage intelligent.”
And the English word “smoking”— in this case meant to describe preparing and curing meat by exposing it to wood smoke — gets no less than three expressions to help guide users avoid making any dreaded anglicisme. It suggests “fumage,” “fumaison” and the delightfully fanciful “boucanage.”
Other terms will no doubt educate English-speaking users about their own language. The guide uses the term “espace de tête” to describe the empty part of a package not occupied by its chief contents — like the air in potato chip bags or the very top of the neck on a bottle of Coke —which it states is a translation of the English word “ullage.”
In its statement accompanying the publication of the Des denrées bien gardées guide, the OQLF explains the reasoning behind producing its vocabulary guides.
“The (OQLF) produces new vocabularies each year to increase the availability of terminology in French linked to key and emerging economic sectors, where the terminological offer is limited and where needs are growing. In this way, it contributes to making French the standard and usual language of work.”
The food preservation vocabulary was produced in collaboration with specialists from Quebec’s Ministry of Agriculture, the Institute on Nutrition and Functional Foods of Université Laval and the Sectoral Committee for Labour in Food Processing. In 2023-2024, the OQLF produced six such vocabularies – on quantum computing, trucking, the circular economy, water treatment, toxicology and physiotherapy.
According to the OQLF’s annual report, the public institution now has 416 employees, a marked increase since its previous annual report, which cited 345 staffers. The language watchdog has a budget of nearly $42 million, a $7-million year-over-year increase. Last year, it spent $2.6 million on communications and about $1.6 million on research.