Wolf Draeger Sep 22, 2012:

@ Tony Yes, but very few, if any, B2B sectors have not been affected by the internet; it seems silly to point it out long ex post facto.

Part of the problem is that dématérialisé really refers to the internet here, rather than any of the terms we've all posted so far; but repeating it so soon after its instance in the preceding sentence would be poor style.

I would take cc's suggestion one step further and reduce the entire extract into one or at most two clean sentences, maybe along the lines of: "The increased use (or dominance?) of the internet and communications technology has revolutionized the travel industry, with online reservations accounting for over 50% of B2B travel transactions".

cc in nyc Sep 22, 2012:

Just in passing It might help to rephrase the sentence to make it more idiomatic in English. ;-)

Tony M Sep 22, 2012:

@ Wolf I don't really think it is all that superfluous, Wolf... surely, they are just saying that, within B2B, business travel is one of the areas that has seen the greatest impact from on-line transactions.

Wolf Draeger Sep 22, 2012:

The more I look at it the more superfluous that sentence - c'est un des univers... - appears. It's just stating the obvious (the internet is changing the way we do business. No! Really?). Any chance you can leave it out, Mark ;-) ?

Tony M Sep 22, 2012:

Logical! After all, you can have a very real office but just with no paper used (how the term was originally coined), whereas a 'virtual' office means there is no office, no paper... no nothing!

Alan Douglas (X) Sep 22, 2012:

paperless v virtual I had always thought that a paperless and a virtual office meant pretty much the same thing. Wikipedia seems to think differently. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_office in relation to my previously posted references. Which makes most sense in the present context?

Mark Bossanyi (asker) Sep 22, 2012:

Aha, thanks Tony, that's better... I'd clicked the GBK term search button. That was why I didn't get a result. Apologies, everyone, for wasting your time!

Tony M Sep 22, 2012:

Something wrong? I think you must be, Mark — I got 27 results first try!

Hint: always check 'also search reverse language pair' and 'fuzzy diacritics', UNcheck 'whole words only' and 'match entire phrase' — and if all else fails, try searching on just the root...

Also, Google is often a better way of searching within KudoZ.

Mark Bossanyi (asker) Sep 22, 2012:

Tony, Yes, but rather surprisingly I got "no matches found" for dématérialisé and dématérialiser. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong...

Tony M Sep 22, 2012:

Glossary Have you tried a term search, Mark? this term has come up at least once before, and the earlier entries ought to give you some options to try.