French-speaking Africa and translation: From midwifery to maïeutique?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the French version of The Lancet Series (2014) midwifery has been translated as maeutique. Likewise, the term maeuticien has recently been introduced in some countries to name (male) midwives. This change of terminology has not been the subject of broad stakeholder consultation. The aim of this study is to explore the opinion of African midwives on the use of the terminologies pratique de sage-femme/maeutique (midwifery) and sage-femme/maeuticien (midwife). METHODS A quantitative study was conducted using an online survey among members of francophone professional midwifery associations in 17 French-speaking African countries. RESULTS From 140 invited midwives, 82 responses were received. The respondents represented 12 francophone African countries. Respondents obviously prefer the terms pratique de sage-femme and sage-femme above maeutique and maeuticien. The sagefemme is acknowledged and deeply rooted in African society. Midwifery is comprehensive, while maeutique does not describe the full scope of midwifery. Though, some respondents believe that maeutique has the potential to differentiate sages-femmes from other health professionals, can diminishing role ambiguity, and value midwifery practice. Respondents in favor of the term maeutique are referring to the modernization of the midwifery profession and its scientific evolution. CONCLUSIONS Internationally, midwives closely follow the developments on the linguistic subject of maeutique. The results of this study may support current discussion about the evolution and modernization of terminology in the francophone community worldwide. Midwives need to be actively involved in these discussions. Nevertheless, at all times we need to be cautious not to break away from midwives' cherished historical, social, and cultural roots.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".