{"id":298,"date":"2010-03-19T13:22:03","date_gmt":"2010-03-19T13:22:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beautytermblog.wordpress.com\/?p=91"},"modified":"2020-01-17T17:08:48","modified_gmt":"2020-01-17T22:08:48","slug":"a-question-of-intolerance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beautyterm.com\/fr\/a-question-of-intolerance\/","title":{"rendered":"A Question of “Intolerance”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Avene<\/a>I recently had a very interesting email exchange with a translation student who contacted me about a terminology question.\u00a0 The issue at hand was the idea of \u201cintolerant skin\u201d coming as a direct calque from the French \u201cpeau intolerante.\u201d<\/p>\n

While it is true that the term exists in English mainly in conjunction with cosmetic products made by French companies (Avene, La Roche Posay, Darphin, etc.), its existence raises a fascinating dilemma of terminological innovation in the beauty industry.<\/p>\n

A native English speaker would cringe at the thought of saying \u201cintolerant skin\u201d, which does not seem like a \u201cnatural\u201d choice in English because of lack of widespread usage in this context.\u00a0 He or she would conclude that the more accurate term would be \u201chypersensitive skin\u201d and thus translate \u201cpeau intolerante\u201d accordingly.<\/p>\n

However, French cosmetics companies are \u201ctrendsetters\u201d using marketing strategy and lexicologic\"Guerlain-SOS-Serum-for-Sensitive-and-Intolerant-Skin\"<\/a>al innovation to differentiate their products on a highly saturated market. They need to make their products distinct and one-of-a-kind in order for consumers to be drawn to buy them; one of the ways to do that is to establish new distinctions between different types of skin.<\/p>\n

French marketers have thus at some point made the conscious decision to use the term \u201cintolerant skin\u201d in English in order to emphasize the idea of their products as being highly targeted and specifically designed to meet a very particular need.<\/p>\n

Their choice was also part of a trend to \u201cmedicalize\u201d products to give them what some consumers will perceive as the \u201cscientific\u201d seal of approval. In fact, \u201ccutaneous intolerance\u201d or \u201cskin intolerance\u201d is really more of a medical notion (e.g. cutaneous intolerance to wool clothing as a typical feature of atopic dermatitis) so what we have here is an example of terminological transfer between two fields.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently had a very interesting email exchange with a translation student who contacted me about a terminology question.\u00a0 The issue at hand was the idea of \u201cintolerant skin\u201d coming as a direct calque from the French \u201cpeau intolerante.\u201d While it is true that the term exists in English mainly in conjunction with cosmetic products […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1802,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-language"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"2.8.11","language":"fr","enabled_languages":["en","fr"],"languages":{"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"fr":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beautyterm.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beautyterm.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beautyterm.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautyterm.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautyterm.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/beautyterm.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2928,"href":"https:\/\/beautyterm.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298\/revisions\/2928"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautyterm.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beautyterm.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautyterm.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautyterm.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}