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.