What function can one ascribe to foreign terms - French terms in this instance - in newspaper discourse? To what extent can one discriminate between deliberately untranslated terms and more traditional borrowed terms in newspaper reports dealing with France? The comparison of two surveys of France published by The Economist in 1991 and 1995 respectively reveals how a limited number of icon-like words can be used to convey a reality which cannot be properly accounted for in the host language. At a deeper level of analysis, one suspects that the syntactic treatment of foreign terms may conceal a subdued criticism of the other country's reality.