Variation terminologique en francophonie

Our research aims to elucidate the factors that influence the terminological implantation of a term by proposing a new typology of those factors with a method revealing how their mechanism causes terminological variation in French-language ICT. We accomplish this through an analysis of four Francophone communities: France, Quebec, Belgium, and Switzerland. After establishing a new typology, which encompasses the terminological, socio-terminological, psycho-terminological, and extra-terminological factors, we propose a hypothetical model of their mechanism by introducing three statistical concepts—dependent, independent, and moderator variables— to elucidate these factors’ relationships. We verify our model in two steps. First, for the analysis of terminological and socio- terminological factors, we examine the relations between each factor and terminological implantation of 256 French ICT terms. For this, we begin by coding the terms according to a criterion established for each factor. We then carry out a correlation analysis with Spearman’s rank correlation. Second, we analyse the psychoterminological and extra-terminological factors with statistical tests on the answers to our questionnaire, which show significant differences between these four linguistic communities. Our analysis confirms a significant difference between the three European countries and Quebec in the mechanism of the terminological implantation factors and we conclude that the psycho-terminological and extra-terminological factors play a decisive role in this difference, which we identify as diatopic.