Dormouse559 wrote: anglo-saxon adj - of or having to do with the United Kingdom and Ireland
I'm not sure how widespread this usage is, but I saw it in an
article just now and was rather surprised. For me, "Anglo-Saxon" can be a narrow term based on heritage: "of English ethnic descent"; I'd tend to exclude Irish, Scottish and Welsh descent. "Anglo-Saxon" can also be a broad term for an intersection of language, history and race: "Western/white Anglophone" (French also has this sense). But I haven't seen it used as a collective term for the UK and Ireland before.
This is all ignoring the historical meaning of the terms — the Germanic people who settled in England — which both languages have.
Le Figaro wrote:Pour la presse anglo-saxonne, la France est la favorite du tournoi
WalesOnline a interrogé 26 journalistes anglais, gallois, écossais et irlandais, tous spécialisés dans le rugby.
For the Anglo-Saxon press, France is the favorite to win the [Six Nations] championship
WalesOnline interviewed 26 English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish journalists, all specializing in rugby.
Ciarán12 wrote:Dormouse559 wrote: anglo-saxon adj - of or having to do with the United Kingdom and Ireland
Not gonna lie, if I met someone using this in that way I would be fucking livid, regardless of what language they were supposedly using it in. I don't accept this as a false friend, but as ignorace to the point of offence.
I don't think they do use it that way ("of or having to do with the United Kingdom and Ireland"). I think it's used to refer to any English-speaking places or situations, whether they are from the UK, Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia, etc. In this case, the press which reported on the interviews happened to be from Wales. (The interviewees from were the UK and Ireland, but I don't even think the adjective "anglo-saxonne" referred to their origins, just to the press.)
In Spanish,
anglosajón can be used to mean "English-language" or "English-speaking" (as adjectives). Looking at your examples, I'm pretty confident that's what was meant here too. They used the word specifically to refer to the
press (
la presse anglo-saxonne), not actually the people who were interviewed. I'd translate it as "For the English-language press, France is the favorite to win the championship."
I don't know how common that is in French, but it's definitely used that way in Spanish, and it wouldn't surprise me a bit to see a Spanish version of this article say
la prensa anglosajona here. In fact, in Spanish saying
anglosajona clarifies that they are talking about the
language used by the press rather than the nationality or geographic location of its offices or journalists (or interviewees). In Spanish they couldn't say
la prensa inglesa for "the English-language press" here because it would give the impression that they were talking about press from England, and the press in question is an English-language one from Wales (
not from England), so
anglosajona is more precise and correct. (It's not the
only way to say "English-speaking" or "English-language" in Spanish, but it's one of the ways.)
So the way I understand it, they are just saying that the site WalesOnline (maybe also the referenced journalists' publications) are part of the "English-language press" (as opposed to, say, the French-language press), not commenting on the nationality or origin of the interviewees. I don't know how common it is in French (I would have expected it to say
anglophone myself, but the way I understand it, they're using
anglo-saxon here with the same meaning as anglophone). I found other examples of this, including
this book in French called "Lire la presse anglo-saxonne", about the language used by "la presse anglo-saxonne"; the book with that title includes examples from both English and American press, so in other words there they are clearly using the phrase "la presse anglo-saxonne" to refer to the English language (regardless of national origin) and not to English nationality or to England (nor to "United Kingdom and Ireland").