How important is French when working in France coding Java?

Question

I am looking into the possibility of working in IT in France - I currently work remotely for a UK company, but live in France, and speak French reasonably well (my native language is English).

The problem I have is that I have no technical French, and am wondering how important French is, working in IT in France (Java programming specifically). The reason I ask is that a friend of mine lives and works in Switzerland, and he does all his work in English. I realise that France is probably a different case, partly due to the laws to protect the French language, and would appreciate any guidance about this aspect of working in France.

If anyone can post some links to some good French-language Java sites, that would be good too!

Answer 1

actually, there has long been a movement to make English the "official" language of programming (much the same way that English is the official language for all air-traffic controllers).

As such, you would probably be perfectly fine building software in French, but need help on the content presented to users (localization/etc).

In fact Jeff Atwood blogged on this topic this morning: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001248.html

Answer 2

I work and live in Berlin, all my colleagues are native Germans, and I must say that all have a good grasp of the English language. Although it has been hard to find jobs as a programmer only speaking English, but this I think has more to do with the HR department than with possible direct colleagues. So if we programmers could have more influence on the hiring process I think there shouldn't be a problem hiring people who only speak English in another language environment. But like you I have no idea what the story would be in France.

Answer 3

I guess it depends on the company. I have been working for a French group for 16 years where all documentation (developer oriented and user oriented) was in English. The product was sold to French companies among others and everything was in English.

As a developers or IT guy, you need to understand French to get along with your colleagues but you should be able to program in English in most cases.

Answer 4

Hi, I don't know about France, but I live in Québec, so the situation is similar, except that I'm a French native speaker, and I have to use English at work.

Here, you will most often be understood when you use English terms, because the other programmers, have to read documentation / examples, just like you. And most of the documentation is in English.

As for producing code, depending on where you work, you might be required to write / comment your code in English. (Really depending on the company. If you work for the governement, it will probably in French, but if you work for a company with internationnal customers that buy the source code with the software, you will probably code in english anyway.)

Answer 5

I am German and I am working in Germany, but I worked in the California, studied some time in Dublin and I had coworkers with British and Spanish background working in Germany.

If you don't know the main language you will have a tough time finding a job and getting your job done. The problem won't be with other programmers. Most of those will be able and willing to communicate in English.

BUT

Coding and talking about code is just one little piece of a programming job. If you can't talk fluently to customers in their native language you will miss many of the little things that are so important in during analysis.

For most customers documentation, communication, training must happen in the native language. All company internal documentation will be in French. Non technical employees will have a tough time communicating in English.

BUT (once more)

If you live in France, work in France you should have plenty of training in order to get your French skills up to speed. It should be pretty simple:

• If necessary get some formal training to get you started
• Get native French speaking friends
• Participate in as many common activities as possible. Prefere activities where you have to talk a lot. Private parties are great, going out in clubs isn't.
• Talk French whenever there is at least one French speaking person within reach. Don't switch to English just because they understand you.
• Get at least on person that will correct your French. Preferable a coworker in the same office.

Answer 6

I am French, in a large French company and what I see (for IT people) is:

• all programming or technical documentation is in English because we have US or Bangalore or Tokyo branches which can or must look at the code/docs.
• all user documentation will be in French, except if the application is deployed world-wide
• all internal meetings are in French, which means we summarize those for our English colleagues.

Basically, if the French company has ties with foreign branches, oral and writing English skills are implicitly mandatory for all French employees involved with programs and/or involved with said foreign entities.

But what surprised me the most when asking my French peers about their respective ease with English language they have to use, is that it goes beyond the technical aspects and delves far into the cultural side: they do appreciate and enjoy many aspects of English or US culture, either by reading English novels or watching US movies (without any subtitles), or following NFL season or whatnot.
That actually helps a lot when it comes to enforce a foreign language as the default one use for programming or documentation.

Jens mentions "Don't switch to English just because they understand you", which is a good advice, but can lead to some awkward moment since we actually like to hear you speak in English and try to practice English on our own!

Answer 7

I've seen parts of a very big, very very big CAD/CAM, PDM system and names in it were in french. So to say, the syntax of the language was english, but the names, constants, variables .... french.

Answer 8

More than anything: it would be polite to speak the language!

Answer 9

Found this thread by an unrelated search. I am aware I am a bit late but for reference I give my €0.02 (or, in French, my 0,02 €...).
I am French, and I code for quite some time in various companies.

I must say the "technical French" is almost inexistent, and often derived from English. Actually, when I read a French technical article where they carefully translated each word to French, I feel slightly disoriented...
We casually speak (in French!) of combo boxes and hash maps instead of listes déroulantes and ... I just forgot the official translation of the latter! (table de hachage, thanks to Laurent K.)
It makes a slightly bastardized casual language, but we understand each other. You just have to get used to some French mispronouncing (me being first, I am better at writing than speaking!), not to mention spelling mistakes in code or just replacing an unknown English word by a French one!

Like VonC, on my current company, we write code (identifiers, comments) and technical docs in English.
Unlike him, we also do user documents in English, because we have international customers (the application is even hard-coded in English, literal strings everywhere!). Even with French customers (they are technical people too), we ship English docs and they write bug reports in English...
Internal meetings are in French...

The general tendency in France is to write code in English. Some beginners (I was one of them...) still write comments in French. Hey, I am even guilty of having written a rather large VBA application (for Excel) with identifiers and comments in French (with accents!)... to be in synch with the localized version of VBA (Microsoft made French, German and perhaps Spanish versions... Which led to lot of problem of portability).

French technical sites: set Google to bring results in French as well in English. For me (it might look at other parameters like preferred languages in browser), it brings lot of French pages in my searches (sometime as top links). Somehow, I often prefer to find English articles... :-)

A starting point: Java - Club des décideurs et professionnels en Informatique, eg. their FAQ Java. Also Le développement avec Java, JavaFR.com, Programmation en Java, among others.

Answer 10

If anyone can post some links to some good French-language Java sites, that would be good too!

Here's an online dictionary: Le Jargon Français, dictionnaire d'informatique francophone

Wikipedia is a source of French-language text, for example: Java (langage)

You can also set Google to return only French or only francophone pages.