Networking and security

La supervision is the entry on this page an English reader will translate on sight and get wrong, because the cognate is the same length and belongs to a different world. In English, « supervision » is done by one person to another: a supervisor on a shift, a doctoral supervisor, a child left under supervision. It implies somebody answerable below and somebody watching above, and it never means a wall of graphs. French la supervision, in this list, is the machine-watching trade — the dashboards, the thresholds, the telephone that rings at four in the morning — and the English for that is « monitoring », a word with no French relative in ordinary use. The French noun does the institutional job as well, as in la supervision bancaire, but for a person in charge of people it says le responsable or le chef de service, and for keeping watch over somebody, la surveillance. So the sentence on this page, la supervision réveille quelqu’un avant les utilisateurs, describes an alerting system and not a manager — and a reader who hears « supervision » in it has quietly changed the subject from software to staff.