The right tools for every professional! Among those used by the certified translators and interpreters members of OTTIAQ, one will find the Usito dictionary. This unique linguistic resource documents in a rigorous fashion the French language written and spoken in Canada. Let's have a look at the distinctive features of this tool and the new words added to the platform in 2024.
At Alpha Translation & Interpretation, many of our translators and interpreters are certified by OTTIAQ (l’Ordre des traducteurs, terminologues et interprètes agréés du Québec).
Our professionals want to meet your translation needs in Canada and abroad, and Usito is one of their main references. Its strength lies in its ability to document the particularities of Canadian French while maintaining strong and essential ties to international French.
Usito is the first dictionary to be based solely on Canadian linguistic corpora, and was developed by lexicographers and linguists at the Université de Sherbrooke. It has been offering free use of this dictionary since 2019.
The editorial team maintains a linguistic watch, continues to integrate new usages and neologisms, and publishes articles highlighting the evolution of the language in the North American context.
The result of this linguistic monitoring of media and databases is Usito, which records over 400 new words every year. Let's take a look at some of the additions of the past year.
In 2024, Usito developped it's corpus with the addition of terms reflecting contemporary issues in Canada.
Among them are numerous neologisms related to new realities such as “well-caring”, “entrepreneurial acquisition”, “metavers”, “greenwashing” and “neurodiversity”.
We also note the presence of scientific terms that have become commonplace, such as “syncytial”, “psilocybin” and “respiratory syncytial virus”.
New features of the culinary world include “chai”, “kimchi”, “poke”, “tahini” and “naan”.
Last but not least, Usito is a dictionary that reflects Canadianisms such as “seigneuresse”, “montérégienne” or “renoviction”, and criticizes certain uses of Anglicisms - “cancel culture”, “gamification”, “cold case” - by proposing neutral terms.
These new words are added to a nomenclature of some 60,000 terms, spread over more than 45,000 lexicographical records.
The platform continues to evolve to meet the requirements of professional translators and interpreters like those at Alpha Translation & Interpretation, with features that enable precise, contextualized searches, essential for guaranteeing translation quality.