Institutional terminology
Reader comment on item: prime minister. n.

Submitted by Llewellyn BROWN (France), Jul 9, 2009 at 16:51

Mahmud Abbas' official title, if I am not mistaken, is "chairman". No problem in Hebrew ("yoshev rosh"). In French, that translates as "président" : the same term for the "chairman" of any form of organized meeting and… the head of a republic. It is a lexical confusion that is widely exploited in the French media : Yassir Arafat, followed by Mahmud Abbas, are called "président", as if they were heads of some sort of country or state…

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