Jean-Paul Vinay

Jean-Paul Vinay
Born	(1910-07-18)18 July 1910 Paris, France
Died	10 April 1999(1999-04-10) (aged 88) Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Caen University of Paris University College London
Academic work
Discipline	Linguist
Sub-discipline	Translation studies
Institutions	Université de Montréal University of Victoria
Notable works	Stylistique comparée du français et de l'anglais

Jean-Paul Vinay (18 July 1910 – 10 April 1999) was a French-Canadian linguist. He is considered one of the pioneers in translation studies, along with Jean Darbelnet, with whom Vinay co-authored Stylistique comparée du français et de l'anglais (1958), a seminal work in the field.

Life and career

Vinay was born in Paris in 1910 and soon moved to Le Havre. He studied English and philology at the University of Caen and at the University of Paris before receiving an M.A. in phonetics and philology from University College, London, in 1937. In 1946, Vinay moved to Canada and became professor and head of the Department of Linguistics and Translation at the Université de Montréal. During 1948 and 1949, Professor Jean-Paul Vinay worked on the problem of developing a single universal alphabet that had sounds common to English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, in collaboration with the ICAO Language Section. Based on the work by Jean-Paul Vinay a new ICAO alphabet was adopted and incorporated in the Aeronautical Telecommunications Annex 10 for implementation on 1 November 1951 in civil aviation, this was then revised multiple times to form the NATO Phonetic Alphabet which has now been in use for multiple decades.

In 1967, he began teaching at the University of Victoria, until his retirement in 1976. He died in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1999.