Expressing the Cybermedium (3) : seven years later

Abstract

There are fields – like, for example, the theatre, museology, feminine beauty, sexual identity, the death of languages or astrology – which have idiomatic expression in English and French. There are others that are created within a particular culture and that, becoming universal, are first expressed in the language of that culture and subsequently, through borrowing and translation, in other languages. Such is the case of the Internet, essentially an American creation and development, whose terminology is created in English. In April 1998, the present author published a study of the expression of the Internet in English and French (Wooldridge 1998). A first follow-up appeared five years later (Wooldridge 2003). The present instalment comes seven and a half years after the initial study and two and a half after the first follow-up.