Computer vocabulary in French

The following list of French vocabulary concerns computers and Internet, this will be useful to many English speaking people who are already in France, reading through a French web pages, or perhaps if you are communicating with a French person via the Internet.

Many high-tech words have the same spelling in French and English, however the pronunciation will often change because of the tonic accent on the vowels, take for example the English word "WIFI", in French it is pronounced "wee-fee". Another example is Linux, in French it is pronounced "lee-nux".

Other abbreviations such as ROM, ADSL, Internet just sound the same, so you should not have too much difficulty.

Just for information, if you are in France and need to use a computer do not forget that the keyboard has a different layout to the standard keyboard, in France you will use an AZERTY keyboard instead of the normal QWERTY. Not only will many of the letters change place, but the row for numbers is different, you will have to use the shift key to access the numbers from 1 to 9, without the shift you will have access to many of the French accents.

Computer terms

French English

Le bas-débit
Le blogue
Le câble
La capture d'écran
Le clique
Le clavier
Le courriel
Déconnexion
Le Disque Dur
L'emoticône
L'enceinte (f)
L'écran (m)
Le feuille de calcul
Le FIA (fournisseur d'accès à Internet)
Le fichier
Le fond d'écran
L'haut-débit
Le icône
L'informatique
Le jeu de Rôle
Le lecteur CDROM
Le logiciel
Le Lien
La Mémoire Vive
La Mémoire morte
Le moteur de recherches
Le Multijoueurs (m)
Le ordinateur
Le plantage
Le réseau
Le site web
La touche
Le serveur
Le son
La souris
Le tableur
La Toile
La tour centrale
Le traitement de textes

Slow speed Internet
The blog
The cable
Screen shot
The click (of the mouse)
The keyboard
The E-mail
Deconnect / logout
The hard disk
The smiley (emotional icon)
The speaker
The screen
The spreadsheet
ISP (Internet service provider)
The file
The background screen
The broadband, High speed Internet
The Icon
Computing
Role playing game
The CDROM player
The program
The link
The RAM
The ROM
The search engine
Multiplayer
The computer
The crash
The network
The web site
The key (on the keyboard)
The server
The sound
The mouse
The spreadsheet program
The Web
La tour centrale
The word processor

Comments

The French translation for Email is offically "Le courriel", this is in the attempt to preseve the french language by the purists, there are also other examples such as Cédérom for CDROM...

Useful French Phrase

 

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