| French | English | Rationale |
|---|
| 1. Capital, placement and investment | | |
| capital | capital | Identity rendering. The meaning is fixed by the corpus, not by the word: proposition 5.1 reserves capital for permanent financing supplied directly to an enterprise by one or more savers (individuals, families, foundations, non-commercial associations). This univocal definition makes capital a root concept from which credit is defined by complement (any financing other than a contribution in capital or quasi-capital). |
| quasi-capital | quasi-capital | Kept as a coinage. Proposition 5.4 defines it as permanent enterprise financing that does not come directly from a saver: shares held by institutional investors, by any enterprise, or by public authorities. The Latin prefix quasi- is productive in English and marks the subtype relation precisely: quasi-capital shares the permanence of capital but lacks its defining origin (a saver). |
| capital social | share capital | Standard English accounting and company-law term. Social capital is a false friend: in English it denotes the sociological concept (networks, trust), which has no place in the corpus. |
| capitaux propres / capital exploité | equity | Capital exploité is share capital including reserves and retained earnings (report à nouveau): the base of BVPS. Equity is the accounting term for exactly this balance-sheet aggregate, and Fabra uses equity capital in the same sense (Capital for Profit, p. 140, 170). The term is deliberately distinct from market capitalization, which may diverge from equity for listed shares. |
| placement | placement (never “investment”) | The corpus partitions two concepts that English usually merges under investment: the saver's act of committing savings to a financing mode (placement) and the entity's expenditure that increases its assets (investissement). Keeping the loanword placement preserves this partition. Fabra poses the distinction conceptually (Capital for Profit, p. 120, 214) without lexicalizing it; the Précis lexicalizes it. The audit of 31 Aug 2026 corrected some 61 occurrences where investment had replaced placement. |
| placement en capital | placement in capital | Subtype of placement. The preposition in names the financing mode into which savings are placed. Proposition 5.5 sets capital and credit as contraries: no repayment term, co-ownership of the enterprise, and income drawn from its earnings. |
| placement en crédit | placement in credit | Sister subtype of placement in capital. It carries a repayment term or repayability at any time, confers ownership of a receivable only, and is remunerated by interest. The parallel construction makes the two subtypes visibly a partition of placement. |
| placement direct en capital | direct placement in capital | Further subtype: a placement in capital made by a saver without intermediation. Distinct from direct investment (investissement direct, ch. 11), which denotes the assets assigned to an internal unit of an enterprise; a translator's note at 11.7 separates these two homonymous English expressions. |
| investissement | investment | Reserved for the entity's expenditure that increases its assets (fixed assets, working capital, public investment, the charge/investment distinction). Established compounds keep investment (ROI, investment banking). |
| capitalisme de rendement | yield capitalism | Built on rendement → yield: a capitalism in which placements in capital are remunerated by distributed profit. The compound is a coinage of the corpus and is absent from Fabra 1991. |
| capitalisme de plus-value | capital gain capitalism | Built on plus-value → capital gain: a capitalism in which the return sought from shares is mainly the gain on resale. Forms a contrastive pair with yield capitalism. |
| plus-value | capital gain | Surplus value is excluded because it is the established rendering of Marx's Mehrwert and would import the Marxian framework the corpus rejects. Capital gain is accepted despite its mildly positive connotation because it functions in English as a fixed technical compound. The corpus classifies a capital gain as a transfer between buyer and seller, even though it arises from an exchange (prop. 5.8). |
| moins-value | capital loss | Symmetric counterpart of capital gain; both are subtypes of the gain-or-loss on disposal of an asset. |
| actionnariat | shareholding | Names the economic status of the holder of shares, in parallel with salariat → wage-earning. |
| prélèvement public | public levy | The corpus defines it as the sum of taxes and new public debt. Levy covers both; taxation would exclude borrowing, and compulsory levies (the usual rendering of prélèvements obligatoires) names a narrower statistical category. |
| 2. Commodities and scarcity | | |
| marchandise | commodity | Commodity is the term of classical political economy (Smith, Ricardo) for anything produced and offered in exchange; Fabra uses it throughout (118 passages). Goods is avoided because, in the corpus, a good is a subtype of supply (fourniture) alongside the service. Merchandise is avoided because it denotes retail stock. The narrower financial sense (raw materials traded on exchanges) is foreign to the corpus. |
| marchandises élémentaires | elementary commodities | Elementary marks the root-level subtypes of the commodity taxonomy. The corpus holds that income arises exclusively from the exchange of elementary commodities; the adjective therefore carries a definitional load. |
| marchandises composées | composite commodities | Open point (§6 of the canonical table). Proposed because elementary / composite is the standard antonymic pair of part–whole decomposition. Not locked: the definition of the class and its relation to the scarce / industrial partition remain to be settled before the term is frozen. |
| marchandises rares | scarce commodities | First subtype of the Ricardian partition of commodities by reproducibility. Fabra uses scarce goods (p. 226, 248); the Précis keeps commodities for terminological homogeneity. |
| marchandises industrielles | industrial commodities | Second subtype of the same partition: commodities reproducible at will. They correspond to Ricardo's and Fabra's reproducible goods; a note may record this equivalence for readers of Fabra. |
| rareté | scarcity | Standard term, concordant with Fabra. In the corpus it qualifies the non-reproducible subtype of commodity; it is not the general ground of value that marginalist theory makes of it. |
| 3. Income and its partition | | |
| revenu | income | Revenue is reserved for chiffre d'affaires. In the corpus, income is exclusively the remuneration received in exchange for the service of labor or of a placement; transfers are not income (prop. 8.16). |
| revenu du travail | labor income | First subtype of income. American spelling labor, as in Fabra's own voice (labour appears only in his quotations of Ricardo and Marx). |
| revenu de placement | placement income | Second subtype of income. Investment income is excluded under the placement/investment rule. |
| revenu total du travail | total labor income | Macronomic aggregate of labor income (TLI). |
| revenu total des placements | total placement income | Macronomic aggregate of placement income (TPI). |
| revenu global (RG) | total income (TI) | The root aggregate partitioned by the identity TI = TPI + TLI (prop. 8.3–8.4). Global is rendered by total because English global suggests worldwide scope. Fabra's total income is non-technical; the Précis defines its own term. |
| revenu universel | “universal basic income” (flagged) | Category error, flagged. In the corpus, revenu universel is an oxymoron: an allowance received by an individual is a transfer (a subsidy), not income. The expression is to be treated as a universal transfer / subsidy, and the word income in it signalled as a categorical misnomer, never validated. |
| revenu de transfert | “transfer income” (flagged) | Category error, flagged. The corpus calls this denomination contradictory: it conflates incomes proper (in exchange for a service) with transfers, and so suppresses the primary distinction between economic exchanges and economic transfers (prop. 8.16). |
| 4. Rates and ratios: the RPP′ relation | | |
| rentabilité | rate of return | Rentabilité is margin relative to capital (or to the investment it finances). Profitability would be a false friend, since profitabilité is a distinct concept. The three terms form the RPP′ identity: rate of return = productivity × profitability (R = P × P′). |
| profitabilité | profitability | Margin relative to revenue or value added (P′). The corpus warns that the most profitable activity is often the least rentable, which makes the R/P′ distinction operative. Fabra's single occurrence (p. 174, a return calculation) is not followed. |
| productivité | productivity | The P factor of the RPP′ relation: sales relative to the investment that supports them (e.g. stock rotation). Concordant with Fabra. |
| rendement | yield | Income paid by a placement relative to its base. Consistent with yield capitalism. Fabra uses yield mainly as a verb; the noun is defined by the corpus. |
| de même appartenance | of the same systemic level | The French qualifies rates (direct rates of return, productivities, profitabilities) that belong to the same node of an enterprise's tree of internal enterprises (arborescence d'appartenance), and are therefore comparable. A literal of the same membership is opaque in English; systemic level states the comparability condition and aligns with the macronomy/mesonomy/micronomy levels. Point to watch: the French also implies a common parent node (the sister productivities of ch. 11), which a first-occurrence note should make explicit. |
| 5. Earnings, profit and their partition | | |
| bénéfice | earnings | Locked (10 Oct 2026). Earnings is the genus. Profit is reserved for distributed earnings (prop. 6.1), so it is a part of earnings, never a synonym. Rendering bénéfice as profit had made several statements tautological or false (e.g. a rate of profit compared with “the rate of profit”); some 155 corrections were applied. |
| résultat (comptable) d'une entreprise | earnings | Same concept as bénéfice for an enterprise. |
| résultat d'un ménage ou d'une association non commerciale | result | For these entities the result is savings or dissavings, not earnings; earnings would be misread as labor income and contradict the thesis of the passage (4.7). |
| profit | profit | Restricted to the distributed dividend (prop. 6.1): portion P of earnings. Fabra uses profit in the broad sense of income from capital; the Précis prevails, and a note may signal the divergence to readers of Fabra. |
| taux de bénéfice (sur capital, sur chiffre d'affaires) | rate of earnings (on capital, on revenue) | Strictly distinct from rate of profit. Chapters 6 and 7 compare both rates in the same sentence; merging them destroys the argument. |
| taux de profit | rate of profit | Rate of distributed earnings on capital; the basis of NARP. |
| bénéfices non distribués | undistributed earnings | A flow. Retained earnings is reserved for the balance-sheet stock (report à nouveau, reserves), as the stock/flow axiom (prop. 4.2) requires. Retained earnings remains correct in the definition of BVPS. |
| répartition des bénéfices | partition of earnings | The split into portions A, I, P, T. Partition is the exact ontological term (exhaustive, non-overlapping subsets). The chapter title Distribution (répartition du revenu global) is unaffected: the partition rule applies to earnings only. |
| affectation (à une portion) | allocation | The assignment of an amount to one portion of the partition. |
| distribution des bénéfices | distribution of earnings | Payout to capital placers, i.e. portion P only. Separating partition (which includes self-financing A) from distribution (which excludes it) removes a contradiction with the corpus's critique of self-financing. |
| bénéfice après intéressement et réserves obligatoires | distributable earnings | Defined once, in 6.5. |
| distribution de la totalité des bénéfices | full distribution of distributable earnings | Locked — protected term. Replaces full distribution of profits. Doctrine: portion A reduced to mandatory reserves, voluntary self-financing nil. The wording avoids a double contradiction: distribution read as partition (which includes A), and full literally false (I and mandatory reserves are deducted). |
| bénéfices des entreprises | enterprise earnings | Aligned on entreprise → enterprise. Business earnings was considered and rejected for consistency. |
| bénéfices des sociétés | corporate earnings | Corporate restricts the scope to legal entities (companies); use it only where the French says sociétés. |
| impôt sur les sociétés | corporate income tax | Standard English designation of the tax. |
| intéressement (au bénéfice) | earnings-sharing; wage-earner earnings-sharing | Built on bénéfice → earnings. Rejected: profit-sharing (would make I a subtype of P), incentive (a neoclassical behavioral concept, not a portion of a partition), gainsharing (indexed on productivity gains; collides with capital gain), participation (a distinct French statutory scheme). The qualified form applies the salarié → wage-earner lock when beneficiaries must be named. |
| parts (de la répartition des bénéfices) | portions | Shares is reserved for actions; in passages where dividends, shares and the partition of earnings co-occur, the ambiguity would be real. |
| A, I, P, T | A, I, P, T (unchanged) | Formal labels of the partition: A = self-financing (autofinancement), I = earnings-sharing, P = profit, T = trop-perçu (refund). Translating them would create collisions (E with E1/E2 and with equity). Source typo in 6.3: “part C” reads I. |
| autofinancement | self-financing | Portion A of the partition of earnings. |
| chiffre d'affaires / produits (comptables) | revenue | Gross revenue is excluded because it implies a gross/net distinction absent from the French. |
| recettes | receipts | Cash inflows, as distinct from revenue (accrual-based). Keeping two words preserves the cash/accrual distinction of accounting. |
| 6. Enterprise and shares | | |
| entreprise | enterprise | Locked document-wide (including the chapter 3 title The Enterprise). Covers every enterprise, including sole proprietorships and internal enterprises within an enterprise; company and corporation are narrower. |
| actions restituables | refundable shares | Prop. 5.8: shares whose only mode of liquidation is repayment by the issuing enterprise; non-negotiable and therefore unlisted. Refundable names that defining property and forms an exact pair with negotiable. Redeemable shares is avoided because it designates a specific legal category in UK and US company law. |
| actions négociables | negotiable shares | Shares liquidated by sale to a third party; the only shares that open the possibility of a capital gain. The pair refundable / negotiable partitions shares by mode of liquidation. |
| sociétés par actions restituables | companies with refundable shares | Company (not corporation) covers variable-capital companies and cooperatives, which the corpus explicitly includes; the term is not restricted to cooperatives. |
| 7. Wages and labor | | |
| salarié (personne) | wage-earner | Wage-earner is defined by the wage it receives (salaire → salarié :: wage → wage-earner) and belongs to the classical tradition. Employee would import the legal employment relation the corpus deliberately separates from the economic category: a farmer working alone is economically a wage-earner. |
| salariat | wage-earning | Economic status, in parallel with shareholding. |
| salaire | wage(s) | The classical term for the price of labor; Fabra never uses salary. Salary connotes monthly white-collar pay and would introduce a status distinction the corpus does not make. |
| salaire brut / net / super-brut | gross / net / super-gross wage | Super-gross (gross plus so-called employer contributions) names the real price of labor in the corpus's analysis. The three adjectives form an ordered series. |
| salaire entier / complet | whole / complete wage | Locked — protected term (complete wage). The wage once so-called employer contributions are reintegrated into it. Protected against accidental substitution during the sound economic exchange propagation. |
| masse salariale | wage bill | Standard term, concordant with Fabra (p. 26, 217). |
| écarts de salaire | wage gaps | The instrument by which the corpus assigns to collective subjectivity the distribution of total labor income (ch. 9; Guideline 11). |
| rémunération du travail | remuneration of labor / labor remuneration | Concordant with Fabra's use of Ricardo's remuneration paid for labor. The attributive form is used in compounds. |
| rémunération médiane / minimale du travail | median / minimum labor remuneration | Attributive form of the preceding entry, with standard statistical adjectives. |
| cotisations patronales / salariales / sociales | employer / employee / social contributions | Employee is kept here by design: these terms name a legal and administrative construction that the corpus analyses as a fiction. The legal register (employee) labels the legal construct; wage-earner stays reserved for the economic agent. Rejected: wage-earner contributions, wage contributions. |
| fiction des cotisations patronales | fiction of employer contributions | Keeps the thesis in the term: so-called employer contributions are in fact part of the wage, paid by the wage-earner (ch. 9). |
| lien de subordination | subordination link | Names the legal relation the corpus reframes: within economic exchange, obligations are reciprocal; one-way subordination is the extra-economic exception. |
| échanges marchands | economic exchanges | Standard rendering; the root concept of the economic domain in the corpus. |
| partenaires sociaux | social partners | Established term of European social dialogue. |
| politique des revenus | incomes policy | Established term (plural incomes), concordant with Fabra (p. 325). |
| 8. Economic security, relief, insurance and pensions | | |
| sécurité(s) économique(s) | economic security / securities | Economic securities are supplied by exchanges of premiums or contributions for benefits, always with actuarial mutualization; the corpus drops the adjective social as concealing this nature. Point to watch: the plural securities collides with the financial sense (titres); keep the qualifier economic in every occurrence. |
| secours (économiques) | (economic) relief | Economic relief is supplied by transfers of purchasing power, as opposed to economic securities supplied by exchange. Relief is the historical English term for transfer-based assistance (poor relief). |
| sécurité sociale | social security | Name of the institution; concordant with Fabra (p. 330). |
| assurances sociales | social insurance | Established term (cf. Bichot, Vive les assurances sociales !). |
| État providence | welfare state | Established term, concordant with Fabra (p. 34). |
| mutualisation | mutualization / pooling | Mutualization keeps the link with the mutual tradition; pooling is the idiomatic insurance term, used where fluency requires it. |
| mutualisation actuarielle | actuarial mutualization | Risk pooling priced on actuarial principles: the defining mode of supply of economic securities. |
| retraites par répartition | pay-as-you-go pensions | Established English label, used when citing the conventional name. Répartition must not be rendered distribution here: that word is reserved for the distribution of total income (ch. 8). |
| retraites par transfert | transfer-based pensions | The corpus's own name for so-called pay-as-you-go pensions, which are in reality transfers from contributors to pensioners (prop. 8.15). Their counterpart is retirement by exchange of the placement service for its remuneration. |
| système unique par points | single points-based system | Rendering of Bichot's proposal (Guideline 12). |
| retraite à la carte avec neutralité actuarielle | à la carte retirement with actuarial neutrality | À la carte is used in English for flexible retirement age; actuarial neutrality is the technical term guaranteeing financial balance. |
| régime à cotisations / prestations définies | defined-contribution / defined-benefit scheme | Standard pension terminology. |
| rente viagère | life annuity | Standard term. |
| arrérages | annuity payments | The periodic payments of an annuity. |
| 9. Exchange and distribution | | |
| plein échange (formulations positives) | sound economic exchange | The most significant editorial decision to date: the author's coinage is rendered by a register-sensitive pair. Applied across some 24 occurrences. Sound, undistorted and distorted denote one ontological entity and its privation. |
| plein échange (formulations critiques) | distorted / distortion of economic exchange | Counterpart of the preceding entry, used in denunciations. |
| clés de répartition | distribution keys | Bases for apportioning amounts (e.g. common costs). Allocation keys is avoided because allocation is reserved for affectation within the partition of earnings. |
| — | full employment / full capacity / complete dividend | Protected terms. Guarded against accidental substitution during the sound economic exchange propagation, together with complete wage and full distribution of distributable earnings. |
| 10. Levels, structure of the treatise, chapter titles | | |
| macronomie / mésonomie / micronomie | macronomy / mesonomy / micronomy | Neologisms preserved to distinguish the corpus's three systemic levels from the established disciplines of macroeconomics and microeconomics. |
| proposition (première) | Proposition | Descriptive statement of economic science (the numbered propositions of chapters 1–12). |
| Orientation de politique économique | Guideline | Normative counterpart of Proposition: the pair types the treatise's numbered statements into two subtypes (descriptive / prescriptive). Orientation is a false friend (in English: alignment, or an induction session); policy recommendation is too long to serve as a label. |
| La répartition (titre) | Distribution | Distribution of total income between TLI and TPI. Not Partition, which is reserved for earnings. |
| Le salaire (titre) | Wages | Plural, as in classical usage (Smith, Of the Wages of Labour). |
| Les prix (titre) | Prices | Plural: the chapter treats the prices, other than interest, at which enterprises sell (prop. 11.1). |
| L'emploi (titre) | Employment | Names the aggregate state (as in full employment); jobs would name its units. |
| Science économique | Economic Science | Marks the corpus's claim to an objective science of exchange, distinct from economics as the neoclassical discipline. |
| l'homme (générique) | humans | Adopted. Preferred to man, mankind and human beings for concision in a formalized register. |
| 11. Metric acronyms | | |
| RG (revenu global) | TI (total income) | Acronyms are rebuilt on the English expansions so that each letter remains interpretable. TI = TPI + TLI. |
| RT (revenu total du travail) | TLI (total labor income) | Word order follows the English noun phrase. |
| RP (revenu total des placements) | TPI (total placement income) | P stands for placement, never investment. |
| SDP (stock des placements) | PS (placement stock) | Stock quantity of the RPP′ relation at macronomic scale. |
| RDP (rentabilité des placements) | ROP (return on placements) | Follows the ROI / ROE naming convention. |
| PDP (productivité des placements) | PP (placement productivity) | Productivity factor of the macronomic RPP′ relation. |
| P′RG | P′TI (total income profitability) | The prime keeps the P′ notation of profitability in the RPP′ identity. |
| VEPA (valeur exploitée par action) | BVPS (book value per share) | The French metric is share capital, reserves and retained earnings divided by the number of shares. This is exactly the standard formula of book value per share, so the established acronym is adopted. |
| TADD (taux annuel de dividende) | DOE (dividend on equity) | Base 100 = BVPS, as the base of the APR (TAEG) is the loan principal. Dividend on equity is an established ratio of annual dividend to equity. Dividend yield is excluded because it is computed on market price, which would reintroduce the valuation of capital gain capitalism. |
| TIDD (taux interne de dividende) | DPR (dividend payout ratio) | Distributed earnings divided by total earnings: exactly the standard dividend payout ratio. |
| NTDC / taux de capitalisation | ER (equity ratio); never “capitalization rate” | Net worth divided by total liabilities. Capitalization rate is excluded on two grounds: in finance it denotes a yield-based valuation rate, and in Fabra (p. 104) rate of capitalization is the inverse of the profit rate expressed as a duration, a notion tied to the deferred-exchange theory that the Précis does not adopt. Nouveau refers to the renewal of the ratio at each opening balance sheet and needs no English equivalent. |
| TMNC (taux moyen national de capitalisation) | NAER (national average equity ratio) | National aggregate of ER, derived from the statistical analysis of NTDC disclosures. Built on ER to avoid capitalization. |
| TMNP (taux moyen national de profit) | NARP (national average rate of profit) | National average rate of profit on capital, derived from the statistical analysis of DOE disclosures (ch. 10). |
| 12. External and rejected vocabulary | | |
| capital humain | “human capital” (rejected) | Rejected concept. It contravenes the abolition of slavery (humans and their knowledge become assimilable to market wealth) and the rigorous definition of commodity. Fabra rejects the expression as well (Capital for Profit, p. 16). To be signalled as rejected wherever it appears, never validated. |
| plus-value (chez Marx) | surplus value | External framework only. Used exclusively when describing Marxian theory. Within the corpus, plus-value → capital gain. |
| taux de capitalisation (au sens de Fabra) | rate of capitalization (Fabra; not adopted) | External framework only. Appears only in historical notes, marked as not adopted and explicitly opposed to ER. |
| échange différé / échelonné (Fabra) | deferred / phased exchange (Fabra; not adopted) | External framework only. Fabra's theory of capital and profit as exchange over time is not adopted: it risks confusion with depreciation (amortissement). Cited only in historical or divergence notes. |