Jerome's Words: Animator vs. Animateur

This week’s edition of Jerome’s Words will look at another coupling that is often found misused by our in-house translators. As you know, French being the official language here in Quebec, lexical interference is often a common occurrence in our agency’s translations.

Today’s words are Animator vs. Animateur. Often mistranslated in a Quebec English context, these false friends hold very different meanings. Consulting our trusty Canadian Oxford, we see that while an animator is a person who makes animated films, an animateur is someone coordinating or acting as a driving force behind an activity. 

What, you don’t believe people could mistake the two? Take the following example from the Ville de Montréal’s website, which manages to do just that:

In this respect, their enthusiasm was most eloquent: they liked the warm welcome, the skill of the animator in promoting discussion, the participants...

Language involves many levels and components, and as people working in the translation business it is our responsibility to correctly interpret the source text and find accurate counterparts for our target language. In this case, it may be hard, but the Montréal Gazette comes to the rescue:

The Montreal animator/director was in the midst of writing his memoirs, a good portion of which would focus on The Sweater (1980), his iconic adaptation of Roch Carrier’s short story.

As is true for all false friends covered in this blog previously, the case of animator vs. animateur begs to be taken seriously. Be honest, did you ever think about the difference before? Perhaps you have, but mostly likely not. 

This is what we try to achieve with these blog posts, to bring greater awareness into our translation family. We thus hope to have animated you enough so that next time you encounter animator or animateur, you can differentiate them correctly.