« A royal sex scandal in the ant world | Main | Hacking the heart »

Bookmark in Connotea

What’s the French for IUCN? - March 12, 2008

The World Conservation Union / IUCN, guardians of the famous ‘Red List’ of endangered species, has decided that having two names is too confusing.

“From today we are just IUCN,” says its press release. “If you need to explain, it stands for the International Union for Conservation of Nature.”

But read further down the press release and things get complicated again: “A partir d’aujourd’hui, notre nom devient simplement UICN.” [Translation: From today, our name is simply UICN.]

IUCN, UICN? Couldn’t they have fixed this at the same time?

Bizarrely though, if you put UICN into the Google Translator and set it to convert French to English, it changes it to IUCN.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 12, 2008
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Comments

Is that not simply due to the difference of word order between the two languages?

English: International Union for Convervation of Nature
French: Union Internationale pour la Conservation de la Nature

Essentially it is the same name.

Posted by: Lisa | March 21, 2009 01:15 AM

Post a comment

Comments will be reviewed by the blog editors before being published, mainly to ensure that spam and irrelevant material (such as product advertisements) are not published . Please keep your comment brief. Excessively long or offensively phrased entries will be edited.

We strongly encourage you to use your real, full name. E-mail addresses are required in case we need to discuss your comment with you directly. We won't publish your e-mail address unless you request it.

Please enter the numbers you see below - this helps us to cut down on spam. Note that attempting to post within 30 seconds of hitting ‘preview’ or ‘post’ can cause the system to think you are spamming the site. If you are having trouble with this system, you can instead e-mail a comment to 'thegreatbeyond at nature.com'.

please enter code

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blogs.nature.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/4716