Biography

Robert Berrouët-Oriol is a linguist and terminologist.

He worked for many years at the terminology bank of the Office québécois de la langue française, where his responsibilities included updating English–French scientific and technical vocabularies. At the Banque de terminologie du Québec, now known as the Grand dictionnaire terminologique (GDT), he conceived and implemented the first cooperation programme between the Office québécois de la langue française and translation schools and departments in Quebec and across Canada.

Formerly responsible for inter-university cooperation at the Banque de terminologie du Québec (Government of Quebec, Office québécois de la langue française), he later taught linguistics and terminology at the Faculty of Applied Linguistics, Université d’État d’Haïti.

His research focuses on language planning in Haiti, legislative drafting, legal linguistics and language rights, language teaching, and the development of Haitian Creole as a language of instruction.

He is a special adviser to the national governing council of the Regroupement des professeurs d’universités d’Haïti (REPUH), a permanent adviser to the Association des professeurs de créole d’Haïti (Asosyasyon pwofesè kreyòl Ayiti, APKA), and a member of the international committee responsible for updating the Dictionnaire des francophones. In that role, he is preparing to archive all the lexicographic data from Dictionnaire de l’évolution du vocabulaire français d’Haïti by André Vilaire Chery.

As a poet, he has published with Triptyque since the 1980s. As a literary critic, he is the author of the first theoretical study of “migrant writing” in Quebec.