French to English: Information Technology, Part 3

How naive of me!

When you think of information technology, what comes to mind?  My first impression is "hardware."  When I was a corporate employee, I thought of our IT Department as a large, dark room with the words "authorized personnel only" in large blocks of letters on the door.  To me, IT personnel walked around with their own esoteric bag of terms, detached from the outside world and more concerned with modules, maps and fiber optic cables twisted and mangled inside a locked room.  The fact that I didn't mingle with the IT crowd explains part of my ignorance. 

Note I said that I equate IT with hardware.  I imagined a world of imposing industrial computers humming menacingly with reels and reels of tape and a never-ending string of print-outs containing gobbledy-gook, all taking place in a no trespassing zone.

FRENCH	ENGLISH
réseau privé virtuel (RPV)	virtual private network (VPN)
accélerateur graphique	graphics accelerator
adaptation automatique de la fréquence	automatic frequency switching
câble à fibres optiques	fibre optics cable
capture d'écran	screen capture

To get rid of that naiveté and with a genuine desire to be enlightened, I did a bit of reading and learned that IT is  a happy marriage of hardware and software.  One can't exist without the other.  At times, that marriage is marred with problems and inconsistencies, but we all know that when software meaningfully connects with hardware, the relationship can be quite rewarding.   Architectural platforms, switchboxes and work stations are just as important as the software applications that reside in them for the proper processing and execution of  commands.

We are aware that security is a perennial challenge of IT. The media give security breaches occurring in high profile organizations top coverage.  Questions are fired at the security agencies that are supposed to install the safeguards.  Eventually, the reliability of software also comes into question.  This is where the software challenge takes its rightful place alongside the challenge of security.  After all, isn't safe and reliable software the heart and soul of any IT undertaking?

FRENCH	ENGLISH
carte d'entrée analogique	analog input card
débit binaire disponible	available bit rate
déboguer	to debug
échelle binaire	binary scale
enregistrement de suppressions	deletion record
equilibrage des lignes de transmission	balanced routing
filtrage des adresses sources	source address filtering

An interesting paper written by Michael Hogan in 2001 on the challenges of IT standards development calls attention to software as the fifth IT challenge on his list.  Mr. Hogan works for the National Institute of Standards and Technology and has been with the Institute for over 25 years.  He sounds like he's there to stay for as long as his bosses will let him because he says it's the best job he's ever had.  For some of his colleagues, it's the only job. 

What were Mr. Hogan's conclusions about the software challenge for IT? 

• software is an intellectual creation
• quoting what PITAC said in 1999, "the nation needs software that is far more usable, reliable and powerful than what is being produced today"
• measurement is one of the major obstacles faced by the software industry (quoting Capers Jones in Scientific American, 1998)
• sound software standards depend upon sound measurement standards

It might be worthwhile getting some IT administrators together to pick their brains about what they believe to be sound measurement standards.  I'm certain there are aspects in the IT field requiring software applications to be measured in terms of functionality, user-friendliness, rate of effectiveness and whether all or just a tiny segment of its features are utilized to advantage.

FRENCH	ENGLISH
flux de données de sortie	output stream
génie logiciel	software engineering
garnir une carte	to populate
horloge numérique	digital clock
intégration parfaite	seamless integration
interface API	application programming interface
langage SQL	structured query language
maquette	dummy, mock-up
registre de mémoire tampon	memory buffer register
mémoire à accès aléatoire	random access devices
microprocesseur en tranche	bitslice micro-processor

Do IT security managers lead a charmed life?  To the outside world, they do.  Many of us envy them for their technical knowledge.  In a way we put them on a pedestal. To people who know what goes on in the inner sanctum, however, or for those who've been there, done that, it's not exactly a bed of roses.

Mark Egan and Tim Mather (Executive Guide to Information Security, 2005), statistically describe a month in the life of an IT security manager:

• 9,481,668 logs and alerts generated by firewalls and intrusion detection devices
• 620 security incidents
• 450 new viruses
• 250 new vulnerabilities
• 55 investigations
• 2 incidents requiring immediate action

Egan and Mather made that description in 2005.  It's now 2009.  Would it be correct to assume that those figures have since tripled?

This ends our series on IT.  It's an exciting sphere of activity where the birth of new software and hardware will keep IT managers on their toes.  We'll revisit this theme at a later time and give you more IT terms to include in your lexicons.

French to English: Information Technology, Part 2

People with a background in information technology who have years of experience working in both the public and private sectors face bright job prospects.  Make that very bright!  The projections are that jobs in information technology (that includes computer and management information systems, Internet security and infrastructure design) will grow an average of 16% up to the year 2016.

Thanks to innovation, technologies evolve rapidly; those who keep up and become savvy techies can name their price.  Network security specialists are probably the most blessed group.  Companies desiring to maintain that competitive edge will consistently review and replace their existing computer systems and upgrade to more sophisticated networks. 

The US Department of Labor provides median annual earnings in those industries that hire the largest numbers of computer and information system managers:

Computer systems design and related services: $109,130

Management of companies and enterprises: $105,980

Data processing, hosting, and related services: $105,200

Insurance carriers: $102,180

Colleges, universities, and professional schools: $83,280

If you're interested in an IT career, you may want to visit the web site of the Association of Information Technology Professionals:  http://www.aitp.org/.  The association is based in Illinois and regularly sponsors seminars across US cities for information systems professionals.  It also offers scholarships to selected colleges and universities as well as to some individuals and private organizations to further the promotion of information technology systems.

Let's add to your IT lexicon:

FRENCH	ENGLISH
inforoute (ou autoroute de l'information)	information highway
accès	access
courriel	e-mail
bande passante	bandwidth
intelligence artificielle	artificial intelligence
applet (ou mini application)	applet
avatar	avatar
blogue	blog
navigateur Web	browser
bavardoir	chat room
logiciel de conversation en ligne	internet relay chat software
groupe d'utilisateurs multiples	multi-user group
envoi de messages textes	text messaging
témoin (ou biscuit magique)	cookie
piratage logiciel	software piracy
protocole de transfert de fichier	file transfer protocol
fossé numérique	digital divide
large bande	broadband
nom de domaine	domain name
foire aux questions	FAQ (frequently asked questions)
gratuiciel	freeware
manique de la technologie (ou technophile)	geek
interface graphique	graphic user interface
page d'accueil	home page
langage hypertexte	HTML (hyper text markup language)
messagerie instantanée	instant messaging

More terms for you in our third and final series of IT terms!

French to English: Information Technology, Part 1

I read this quote by Steven Wright in the Montreal Gazette:  "If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?"

And if you saw a worm in your hard drive, would you annihilate it?  You probably can if you're a geek and are well-versed with the evil ways of hackers.  But if you're not,  you'd report it to your IT Manager straightaway - unless he and his team have already spotted the little wiggly creature and are busy sending notices to staff members to turn off their computers while they try to deal with this slimy nuisance.

You're familiar with viruses but you're not so sure about worms - how much harm they  inflict and whether or not  they can be totally banned from your hard drive once they're detected and removed.  You've also heard of  Trojans.  If you're like me, you want to understand how the three differ.

I consulted the Symantec web site.  A virus is a tiny computer program that changes how a computer operates.  To qualify as a virus, two criteria must be met - first it must execute on its own and second, it must replicate itself. 

Symantec identifies five types of viruses:

• file infection viruses
• boot sector viruses
• master boot record viruses
• multipartite viruses; and
• macro viruses

A worm is also a program that replicates itself without a host file.  In layman terms, this means that worms are inside  other files like Word or Excel documents, but they use host files differently.  A worm will release a document that has the "worm" macro within the document; this document then travels from computer to computer and hence becomes the worm itself. 

Symantec describes Trojan horses as impostors.  They pretend or appear to be desirable files when in fact they contain malicious code that can wipe out or steal data from an infected  computer.

Viruses, worms and Trojan horses constitute only a tiny aspect  of a company's information security program.  This is why when executives gather in the boardroom, one hot topic that makes it to the agenda is not so much their profit and loss statement or what charities they will support next year, but the status of their IT program and how best to enhance security controls.  This takes on more significant proportions when financial institutions and intelligence agencies are involved and IT personnel have detected a security breach.

The damage caused by worms in terms of dollars and cents can run into billions.  For example, the first worm that appeared in 1988 was the Morris Worm.  It disabled 10% of computers connected to the Internet.  Code Red Worm (July 2001) infected 2.3 million computers with a cost of $2.75 billion.  The Sapphire/Slammer Worm in January 2003 infected 90% of hosts in just 10 minutes and generated damages of $1.5 billion.  There were many others, all causing at least a million in damages, not to speak of the administrative nightmares they created.

Here's our first instalment of IT terms with a focus on security:

FRENCH	ENGLISH
cryptage (ou chiffrement)	encryption
piratage logiciel	software piracy
base de données	database
signature numérique	digital signature
télécharger	to download
commerce électronique	e-commerce
mordu (ou pirate informatique)	hacker
reniflage de paquets	packet sniffing
pourriel (ou spam)	spam
ver informatique	worm
pare-feu	firewall
détection d'intrusion	intrusion detection
réseau privé virtuel (RPV)	virtual private network (VPN)

Trivia (but not really trivia):  Heard of the Halloween Documents?  It has nothing to do with a treatise on award-winning costumes.  In fact the concept is stripped of costumes and is linked to open source.  The Halloween Documents were actually a collection of confidential Microsoft documents that revealed the initial sentiments of the software giant about the threats that Open Source represented.  The documents supposedly contained the strategies of Microsoft to fight Linux and Open Source.  Microsoft has since admitted the authenticity of these documents (source:  David Bell et al:  Cyberculture.  ISBN:  0-415-24754-3, Routledge, England).