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11:54 May 24, 2011
French to English translations [PRO] Marketing - Advertising / Public Relations
French term or phrase:Loc'acteur
We are currently localizing a website from French into English. The platform is based on collaborative consumption, and in analogy to "consom'acteur", which refers to pro-active, responsible and sustainable consumption, the website refers to people who rent out /swap / lend out their belongings to other users as "loc'acteurs". This word has been made up for this specific website, and our English translator (I am French) has so far not found any nice equivalent. Would anyone have a bright idea? Must be short and catchy as this appears on menus etc.
The target audience is general public, so any term that is used must be easily understood.
I wrote a discussion entry yesterday - but it seems to have disappeared!
This is a very very hard concept to translate, and it seems nearly impossible to find an equally snappy term in English - this is the sort of stuff marketing agencies pay lots of money for! It really needs lots of brainstorming: from what I saw online, it's about renting, loaning and sharing, rather than buying, so a loc'acteur is primarily a NON consumer, someone wishing to find an alternative to buying and encourage others not to consume unnecessarily. I'm not sure there really is any solution in English that refers to a person, because of the different activities involved. So you might have to leave the FR right behind and go with a snappy but easily comprehensible non-person concept, like SBlack's idea - the wordplay is nice, but probably too long. Maybe something with "alternative"? Or abbreviated to "alter" (tho' that's mostly done in French). I've just thought of a person word that might work: "trader" - "alternative trader", "alter-trader", "responsible trader", "sustainable trader"... Hope this gets some ideas rolling...!
That's a lot more understandable now - it sounds like it's a website that puts people in touch with one another. Does it always involve money changing hands?
Example of sentence: Deviens loc'acteur maintenant, partage les objets qui encombrent dans ton grenier ou ta cave avec tes amis et voisins.
Deviens loc'acteur maintenant, n'achète pas une nouvelle tondeuse à gazon, loue-en une à un voisin ou à un pro de ta région.
Refers to everyday belongings rather than to properties.
Plays on both locataire, loueur, and location, as it can address both those the landlord who lends belongings to renters or a renter who borrows something from a landlord.
Or is it the landlord who lends belongings to renters?
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Answers
7 mins confidence:
Lend-user
Explanation: I'm obviously trying to play on "end-user". However I guess you want consistency on the "acteur" ending, so that would mean "consom'acteurs" as something like "consum-users". What do you currently have for "consum'acteurs"?
Mike Birch Local time: 16:48 Specializes in field Native speaker of: English, French
Notes to answerer
Asker: Actually the site does not use "consom'acteurs", and it does not seem like "consum'actors" is really used in English. So I guess I do not have any specific idea in mind, except that the word used should reflect the proactive attitude of the user who rents/lends / swaps their belongings. There is also a dimension of sustainability, being environmentally-friendly doing this, which the French expression relays quite well.
The translation workplace 
