French for Developers: Technical Vocabulary You Actually Need

Duolingo teaches you to say "Le chat mange une pomme" (the cat eats an apple). Useful for cat-related apple conversations, less useful for your first French technical meeting where a colleague says "Il faut corriger le bogue dans la méthode de tri avant la mise en production." Standard French courses don't cover the technical terminology that developers need. This guide does.

Core Technical Terms

Development basics: un logiciel (software), le matériel (hardware), un programme (program), le code source (source code), une bibliothèque (library — yes, the same word as a physical library), un cadriciel or framework (framework — the English word is increasingly used), une base de données (database), un serveur (server), le déploiement (deployment), la mise en production (going to production), un environnement de développement (development environment).

Programming concepts: une variable (variable), une fonction (function), une boucle (loop), une condition (condition), un tableau (array — also means "table" and "painting"), un objet (object), l'héritage (inheritance), le polymorphisme (polymorphism), une interface (interface), un rappel or callback (callback), une promesse (promise), un fil d'exécution (thread).

Development workflow: un bogue (bug — French-Canadian spelling of "bug," widely used), corriger (to fix), déboguer (to debug), tester (to test), valider (to validate), réviser le code (to review code), fusionner (to merge), une branche (branch), un dépôt (repository), un commit or une validation (commit), un ticket or un billet (ticket/issue).

Meeting Vocabulary

Daily standup equivalents: "Qu'est-ce que tu as fait hier?" (What did you do yesterday?), "Sur quoi tu travailles aujourd'hui?" (What are you working on today?), "Est-ce que tu es bloqué sur quelque chose?" (Are you blocked on anything?), "J'ai besoin d'aide avec..." (I need help with...), "C'est en cours de revue" (It's under review), "C'est prêt pour la mise en production" (It's ready for production).

Sprint planning: les exigences (requirements), l'estimation (estimation), les points d'effort (story points), la vélocité (velocity), le carnet de produit (product backlog), le sprint (sprint — used as-is in French), la rétrospective (retrospective), le propriétaire du produit (product owner).

Code Review Phrases

"Ce code est propre" (This code is clean). "Il manque des tests unitaires" (Unit tests are missing). "Cette méthode est trop longue, il faudrait la découper" (This method is too long, it should be broken down). "Est-ce qu'on peut simplifier cette logique?" (Can we simplify this logic?). "Il y a un risque de fuite mémoire ici" (There's a memory leak risk here). "Le nommage n'est pas clair" (The naming isn't clear). "Approuvé, tu peux fusionner" (Approved, you can merge).

Documentation Writing

French technical documentation follows specific conventions: use the infinitive for instructions ("Configurer le serveur" — Configure the server, not "Configurez" which is imperative), use "on" instead of "nous" for inclusive instructions ("On démarre le serveur" — We/one starts the server), and maintain consistent terminology throughout (don't alternate between "bogue" and "bug" in the same document).

The French tech community increasingly uses English terms for concepts without clean French equivalents: "le cloud," "le machine learning," "le DevOps." Quebec's Office québécois de la langue française actively creates French alternatives (infonuagique for cloud computing, apprentissage automatique for machine learning), and these terms appear in Canadian French contexts but are less common in European French tech communication.

Resources for French Tech Vocabulary

Podcasts: "Artisan Développeur" (development practices in French), "Tech Café" (French tech news). YouTube: Grafikart (French web development tutorials), Fireship-style channels in French like "Benjamin Code." Documentation: Read the French versions of MDN Web Docs, React documentation, and PHP documentation (PHP has excellent French documentation). The immersion in technical French — reading docs, watching tutorials, listening to podcasts — builds the specific vocabulary that general French courses never cover.