Jacques Toubon

He was Minister of Culture in the Edouard Balladur[?] government, while François Mitterrand was president (second cohabitation of the Fifth Republic).

Best known for the "Toubon Law"; the law of August 4, 1994 relating to the French language usage. The law specifies that French must be at least as prominent as any other language and prohibits the use of foreign terms in some areas all together.

Two groups, the Association for the Defense of the French Language and the Future of the French Language, use the Toubon Law to demand that information on web sites which come from France must be in French. They filed a complaint against Georgia Tech Lorraine[?] for publishing a website in English without a translation to French.

Georgia Tech Lorraine is the French branch of the Atlanta-based Georgia Institute of Technology with a campus in Metz, in eastern France, with a current enrollment of 60 students. Classes are conducted in English, and the faculty rotates in from Atlanta. All course descriptions on its internet site were in English, which was supposed to violate the French law.

If the court ruled against Georgia Tech Lorraine, the school would be forced to pay a fine of 1,000 French francs for every day after such a ruling that the site was not translated into French and 10,000 francs to each of the two plaintiffs.

The case ended in failure. Since then, Georgia Tech Lorraine has made its Web site available in French and German as well.

See also: Politics of France, Académie Française

External links

• Why is Europe so unwired? http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.09/negroponte
• English ban neutered. http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,11990,00
• http://www.georgiatech-metz.fr