About this course

This course is aimed at those people who already have a basic knowledge of written French and who want to be able to deal with business materials in French. It is not designed to teach you how to write or speak business French, but only to read and understand.

The course is divided into twelve modules:

• In Module 1 we will look at some basic principles of reading French and we will compare learning to read French with the use of Google translate. We will focus in particular on cognates (words of similar form and meaning in both English and French) and on some basic structures of French terminology and grammar. At the end this first module, you should be able to pick up a text in business French and identify the elements similar to those found in English and a number of the terms peculiar to French.
• In Module 2 we will use a combination of images and words to help you to become familiar with the French words commonly used in an office environment in a francophone country or region. For example, you will learn that the word used in French to designate a file folder is une chemise. At the end of the module, you will be able to apply labels to the basic objects and to the people found in an office or work environment.
• In Module 3, we will look at the structure and content of a curriculum vitae in French, including typical terms used. By the end of the module, you should be capable of reading a typical CV in French.
• In Module 4 we will examine the elements of a covering letter in French. We will also discuss some stylistic and regional differences to take into account in covering letters. By the end of the module, you should be capable of reading a basic covering letter.
• In Module 5 we will discuss the terminology of the job interview and of personnel decisions. We will also spend time looking at the terminology of different employment positions in French, paying special attention to the differences between terms used for men and those used for women. (In French, which has grammatical gender, this distinction is important.) By the end of the module you should be able to understand the basic language of personnel issues in French.
• In Modules 6 and 7, we will look at the language of business communication in French, ranging from the very informal (a quick note), to the more formal (inter-organization communications and public announcements). By the end of the modules, you should be able to get the gist of a typical item of communication and determine its level or formality.
• In Modules 8 and 9, we will look at the language of financial reporting, beginning with an overview, and following this up with examples from financial reports. These modules are not designed to make you capable of understanding accounting principles in detail. However, by the end of the two modules, you should be capable of making sense of some typical elements of financial reporting.
• In Module 10, we will look at the language of banking, both at the federal level and at the level of commercial banks. By the end of the module, you should be familiar with a number of the terms and concepts used in this area.
• In Module 11, we will look at the language of advertising. This is often playful and often includes not only text, but also images and cultural references. By the end of the module, you should be capable of looking at an advertising document and determine the basic gist, and to look for cultural items of importance.
• Finally, Module 12 will be devoted to an overview. It contains a variety of texts from various domains covered in previous modules, as well as comprehension questions and translations.

Approach, course elements and access

This course uses an inductive approach. That means that you will be asked to explore a variety of materials and discover how they work. This involves mousing over objects, clicking, dragging and so on. These explorations will be supported by explanations. To help you ensure that you have understood what you have read, each module will include one or more quizzes to allow you to test your knowledge informally. Finally, each module will end with several reading passages related to what we will have seen in the module. You will not understand everything in these from the outset, but they will provide a window into real French texts. In all cases, translations into English are provided.

To help you recognize the nature of each block presented, they will be colour-coded as follows:

• Blocks designed for exploration will have a light green background;
• Blocks designed for explanation will have a light beige background;
• Quizzes will have a white background;
• Translations and the answers to some comprehension questions will be in white above a brown background. When you mouse over the brown block, the translation or answer will appear.

Some textual items are also colour coded:

• descriptive terms like cognate are in dark red
• French words like une chemise are in blue
• English words like a file folder are in green
• glosses (background explanations or translations) will appear as green bubbles above the text. To see this, hover your mouse over une chemise.

These course materials are entirely open access. That means that anyone can access them. You may explore them as a guest, anonymously. No record is kept of your activities.

Some people want an academic credit for a course. If that is your case, a variant of this course is available from Continuing and Distance Studies at Queen's University in Canada. Its course code is FRST 125. To take it, you must register at Queen's as a student. If you successfully complete their version of the course, you will be given a credit on a Queen's transcript.

Why learn business French?

There is a commonly held view that English is sufficient to do business in both North America and around the world. While there is no doubt that English plays a central role nationally and internationally, the importance of French should not be neglected. Here are some examples:

• There exist Francophone populations around the world and over 30 countries have French as one of their official languages. See for example the list at Ethnologue.
• In Canada, the federal government is officially bilingual and the ability to function in both English and French is a major advantage. In Québec, French is the official language and entities, including governments and businesses, have French as their primary language.
• French is one of the official languages of a variety of international organizations, including the United Nations, NATO and the European Union.
• Francophone Africa is expected to see significant demographic growth over the next decades. The ability to function in French will be an important advantage in this framework. See for example this article in Forbes which argues that French will be one of the world's primary languages by mid-century.

Why not just use Google Translate?

Most people have used Google Translate from time to time. This raises the question: why learn a language when Google Translate is always available. To answer that question, let us begin by considering how Google Translate works. Here is what Google has to say:

What is Google Translate?
Google Translate is a free translation service that provides instant translations between dozens of different languages. It can translate words, sentences and web pages between any combination of our supported languages. With Google Translate, we hope to make information universally accessible and useful, regardless of the language in which it’s written.
How does it work?
When Google Translate generates a translation, it looks for patterns in hundreds of millions of documents to help decide on the best translation for you. By detecting patterns in documents that have already been translated by human translators, Google Translate can make intelligent guesses as to what an appropriate translation should be. This process of seeking patterns in large amounts of text is called "statistical machine translation". Since the translations are generated by machines, not all translation will be perfect. The more human-translated documents that Google Translate can analyse in a specific language, the better the translation quality will be. This is why translation accuracy will sometimes vary across languages. (http://translate.google.ca/about/intl/en_ALL/)

This sounds quite convincing, and in some, perhaps many instances of simple texts, Google Translate can perform a reasonable job. However, let us think a bit more about the approach being proposed. Google Translate is basically a (very) large bilingual dictionary. Like any dictionary, it has no inherent intelligence. It doesn't actually understand the text it is 'translating'. Rather, it is replacing one string by another.

Let us compare this with what we do when reading a text in a language we know. We begin by taking in the forms, but these are quickly forgotten. (Test this by closing your eyes NOW and repeating PRECISELY the words in the Google Translate quotation.) We use the forms mostly as a means to find the meaning of the text. But this meaning is not simply the sum of a set of strings. Rather, it is built up over a text and depends, among other things, on the context the text is written in, who it's written for, who has written it, and for what purpose.

All of these things mean that understanding a language is not an easy process and involves many dimensions. As a result, while Google Translate often works, it also sometimes gets things very wrong. Let us put this to the test.

Parts of speech

When working with texts, it is very useful to have at hand the terminology required to name the elements we are manipulating. One of the most basic elements of terminology is the part of speech. We can divide the words of most languages into some basic parts of speech. Fortunately, English and French share their parts of speech, as the following table illustrates:

Bootstrapping

Although we are only at the beginning of the course, there are already several things you already know:

• You are an educated person, so you can often get a good idea of likely meanings based on your world knowledge. Don't hesitate to use this and to guess. On the other hand, don't assume that your guesses will always be correct.
• If you speak English, you already have access to many words which English and French share. Many of these have the same meaning. They are often referred to as cognates. So, for example, the French word table, when referring to furniture, means the same as the English word table.
• There exist a number of systematic relations between the grammar of French and English. We will focus here on one of them, the mirror effect. In essence, French tends to connect nouns and adjectives in one direction, and English in the opposite direction.

Let us explore these three areas in more detail.

Intelligent guessing

When you are reading a newspaper, one of the characteristics to keep in mind is that the basic information in an article can usually be found in the first paragraph. This can save you a lot of reading, just as can chapter headings, tables of contents and similar condensations. In addition, because texts written in French often talk about events also written about in English, your knowledge of current events, including people, institutions, situations and such, can help to fill in the blanks.

To illustrate this, consider the three following paragraphs, all of them drawn from La Presse:

Le vice-président de la banque centrale américaine, Stanley Fischer, a averti samedi que la Fed n'attendrait pas que l'inflation revienne vers son objectif de 2% avant de relever les taux.

Source: La Presse, August 28, 2015

La Bourse de New York a terminé à l'équilibre au terme d'une séance hésitante vendredi, les investisseurs semblant faire une pause au dernier jour d'une folle semaine marquée par d'énormes mouvements de balancier: le Dow Jones a cédé 0,07% et le Nasdaq a gagné 0,32%.

Source: La Presse, August 28, 2015

Les six plus grandes banques au Canada ont engrangé des profits de 9,2 milliards de dollars au troisième trimestre terminé le 31 juillet dernier, et ce, malgré les préoccupations entourant l'impact de la chute des prix du pétrole ainsi que du ralentissement économique.

Source: La Presse, August 28, 2015

What can you determine from even a cursory glance? At least this:

• The first text refers to a person, Stanley Fischer, and an institution (la Fed). It is a question of inflation and 2% of something (in fact, here, interest rates (les taux).
• The second text appears to have something to do with the stock market (New York, Dow Jones, Nasdaq) and it is question of the figure 0.32% (In French, the comma is often used as a decimal point.)
• The last text has something to do with Canada and of profits of 9.2 something dollars. (In fact, milliards in French means billions in English.

So your knowledge of English and of world events has already given you the gist of all three texts. Now let us see what other devices can give us more detailed knowledge. We will begin with cognates.

Where do cognates come from?

The numerous cognates between English and French stem from a variety of factors. Thus:

• both French and English are Indo-European languages, descended from a common language which is also the parent of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, the Germanic languages, and others;
• English borrowed a number of French words after the Norman conquest in areas like the courts, titles, law, commerce and food: think judge-juge, or duke-duc, or mutton-mouton;
• both languages have continued to create new learned words using Latin and Greek roots: think psychology-psychologie.

Cognates between English and French, when they share the same or a similar meaning, are often referred to as bons amis or 'good friends'. Some French words, however, do not mean the same as their English counterparts having the same form. These are often referred to as faux amis (pronounce fo-za-mi) or false friends. For example, the French word pain means 'bread', not 'discomfort'. One of the important tasks to follow in this module is to begin to acquire a library of useful cognates.

Spelling relations between English and French

When looking at the previous paragraph, you may have noticed that a number of French words have endings which differ from their English counterparts, even though the base forms are quite similar. It is useful to keep these in mind when reading a French text. Two useful tricks will help you identify potential cognates even in the absence of a perfect correspondence between the two languages.

1. Remove all vowels from the French word and see if the resulting skeleton is shared with an English word that would fit in the context you are looking at. For example, the French word marchandise shares the skeleton m*rch*nd*s* with the English word merchandise.
2. Concentrate on the base part of the word when looking for similarities with English. For example, if you see the French word neutralité, take off the ending and look for similarities with English (in this case, neutrality).

There are also some regular relations between word beginnings and word endings in French and English. The following table illustrates some of these:

Try to memorize these for future use and make a list of those you come across in your reading.

The mirror effect

Languages are made up of more than single words. These words are assembled into larger units called phrases, and even larger units like sentences and paragraphs. The grammar of phrases can vary from one language to another. This is what we find when we compare noun phrases (composed of nouns, their determiners and their modifiers) in French and English. To see the difference, consider the following table:

In each phrase, there is a word which represents the essential thing being talked about. Here, it is shown in bold in the first example. So, in the case of American central bank, the core element (or head of the phrase) is bank. The proof: we can say something like the bank in place of the whole phrase. Notice that in English, the head is the rightmost element.

In the case of French, the head of the phrase is typically the leftmost element, after the determiner. Thus, la banque centrale américaine has banque as its head.

To see this principle at work, compare the remainder of the English and French examples in the table above.

Summing up

We have now reached the end of the preliminary chapter. At this point, you should:

1. understand the range of materials we will be dealing with in what follows and how they will be presented
2. be able to use the appropriate techniques to explore texts presented
3. have an appreciation of why translating French to English is complex
4. have a good grasp of parts of speech
5. understand the role played by intelligent guessing in deciphering a text
6. have grasped the importance of cognates in providing an initial sense of a text
7. be able to apply the mirror effect principle to deduce the English equivalent of expressions in French.