Gabriel Huard

Gabriel Huard is Director, Terminology Standardization, at the Translation Bureau, in Gatineau, Canada. He holds a degree in translation from the University of Montréal, Canada.

Canada being officially a bilingual country (English and French), the Canadian government created the Terminology Standardization Directorate in 1974 to develop TERMIUM, now the second largest linguistic data bank in the world, after that of the European Union. The bank holds a total of 3.7 million entries in English and French, as well as 200 000 entries in Spanish, the most frequently translated foreign language within the Canadian federal governement. Over the past 35 years, the Directorate also published close to 300 lexicons on all possible subjects of interest to Canadian public servants.

It is one of those lexicons, that on New Information Technologies, that caught the attention of ANLoc, as there is currently a project to provide ANLoc localisers with a 2500-word vocabulary in English. The Translation Bureau was asked permission by ANLoc to use French definitions from the lexicon. It was then agreed in El Sokhna conference in Egypt, in the beginning of April 2024, that ANLoc could use definitions directly from TERMIUM.

The Translation Bureau is pleased to co-operate with the Canadian Research Center for International Development and ANLoc to provide African localisers with up-to-date French terminology in the field of information technologies.