Non-English Nature Education & Common Names

[quillipede]

So I may find myself this year providing educational support to francophone youth doing nature education programs in British Columbia. I’m a native French speaker, but I grew up in Québec and only became a naturalist in English while living in BC, so I knew I needed to brush up on my francophone nature terminology. Part of how I’m doing this is by switching my iNaturalist account to the French (Canada) locale.

This has quickly highlighted a problem: there isn’t a large-enough, historically old-enough population of French speakers in BC to have fleshed out a full lexicon of vernacular names for many of the native species. So I wanted to start a topic for iNatters to discuss their experiences naturalizing in languages other than English, in areas where those languages don’t have a suite of common names for the local ecology.

I do macro photography and tidepooling among other things, so I’m noticing especially that large proportions of BC mosses and marine invertebrates lack French common names on iNat, but you’ll find species in just about all major groups that don’t have them. Sometimes the names exist but nobody has added them to iNat yet (so I can do that!), but other times it seems there may just not be any that are genuinely “common.”

Another thing I’ve noticed is that many of the French common names seem to be francizations of the scientific names. For example, Western Skunk Cabbage, Lysichiton americanus, is rendered as Lysichiton Américain. As mentioned I came to naturalism in English first, not in French, so perhaps this will not sound very alien to francophone/bilingual schoolkids growing up in BC; but it does give me pause about how common the names actually are. Of course no word is immune to feeling weird if you look closely enough (I don’t routinely parse “cabbage” as “little head” even though that’s the Latin it comes from), but I’m a bit anxious about whether those sorts of terms will be educational barriers, and if they are, how I should work around that. Plus I’d just love to call the thing chou d’mouffette.

Those are some of the things I’ve noticed and thought about so far. What about the rest of you?

Have you navigated similar situations or experiences in the past? Have you helped get common names coined for things that lacked them in your native language? What do you think about all this?

Bonus: One fun adjacent story I like about this is that efforts to translate the board game Wingspan into Serbian led to a collaboration with the Ornithological Union of Serbia on the creation of many new Serbian names for birds that previously did not have non-Latin names in Serbia, because those birds don’t occur in Serbia. I don’t speak Serbian, but if you do, I understand it is discussed in more detail in this video.

[upupa-epops]

I’ve noticed as well when adding additional lexicons in my display settings that common names in other languages have a bunch of issues and look like they some curatorial work (names seemingly directly translated from English or scientific names, or the name for the genus or family applied to every species in it, etc.). I’m guessing it’s worse with species in my area since there aren’t many naturalists who speak those languages who interact with those species. I’m not fluent enough in any other languages to feel comfortable searching for proper names or discussing issues with them with native speakers though.

A working group supported by the Canadian government is working on creating French and English names for every species that occurs in Canada, but its methods are questionable and the results are controversial. Beyond that I’m guessing there aren’t many sources for French names of Pacific Northwest species… When searching the forum I was surprised to see that even recently there were issues with French bird names even for species that occur in Quebec.

I suppose this situation is not dissimilar to situations where amateur naturalists are just starting to get interested enough in a particular taxa for English common names to be useful. In those cases common names don’t exist yet and someone needs to invent them. One way of doing this could be that one person creates a guide for the taxa and invents common names, and then other people can decide whether they like those names and want to start using them (or adding them to iNat).

[phma]

I have the interface set to Spanish and the common names to English and Spanish. I live in western North Carolina and identify alternately in anywhere (which ends up being western America and islands between America and the date line), eastern USA, and the Carolinas. I’ve seen, and sometimes flagged, some oddities in common names.

Witch hazel is “avellano de bruja” or “árboles de bruja” in iNat, but the “witch” in “witch hazel” has nothing to do with brujas. It appears from a web search that the name is in actual use.

Platanus, which is called “sycamore” in English, is called “plátano” in Spanish, but also “sicómoro”, which to me (since I speak Spanish mostly in church) means the tree Zacchaeus climbed, a fig called “sycomore” in English. But as far as I can tell, “sicómoro” is also used for the plane tree.

There was a spider wasp called “matacacatas roja” in iNat, which I flagged for gender disagreement. It turned out to come from only one source, so the “common” name was not common and was removed.

I may think of, or find, some more examples.