Accent grave & Accent Aigu

[Tuba Yucel Boru]

Any comment?

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Hi all,

I'd like to know when to use accent grave and when to use accent aigu. Is there any rule or do I have to memorize?

 

And if possible may I request a short translation?

 

Kind regards in French, and Business Process Management Office in French.

 

 

Thank you very much.

 

 

Sincerely,

Tuba

[Lynn]

Like most important things in French, there aren't really set rules for knowing accent marks. Although you can categorize many words, it is good to memorize important cases requiring grave and aigu. It is more helpful to memorize the words as how they are pronounced (therefore telling you the accent mark needed) than to get confused just trying to remember  the spelling.

The closest translation I could find for Kind Regards is bien amicalement (more accurately translated best regards)

[Benoît]

I can't help for the accent topic (I'm realy bad in French orthography. Well, I'm bad also in English orthography, but at least it's not my native language...).

But for "Kind regards" I can help :
In business mail you can use "Cordialement" or "Bien cordialement".
In personnal but formal mail you can use, as Lynn said, "amicalement" or "bien amicalement"
In personnal and informal mail you are free to use a large panel of expressions as "Bises", "Grosses Bises", "Ciao", "A plus"...

For "Business Process Management Office" I won't try to translate it. By the way a translation can be "Bureau (or Département) de Management des Processus Métiers"

[Neil Coffey]

I think Benoît's point about the different registers of mail is worth stressing. In a business e-mail, "Cordialement" would be the appropriate salutation -- "Bien amicalement" etc are really only suitable in a personal e-mail.

 

For the translation of "Business Process Management Office", this is a case where I'd normally poll a few translators, but a suggestion that occurs is that you could use simply the word "Direction" for "Management office", so just use e.g. "Direction des processus opérationnels". Names of things like this are really a bit arbitrary, it has to be said.

[Neil Coffey]

Re the use of the two accents -- esentially, they represent different vowel sounds, or at least, most of the time.

One clue is that a grave can only ever occur inside a word, not at the end of a word.