TPE - Terminal de Paiement Electronique (2024)

Hello
My hotel reception students asked me today what the English term is for a TPE - it's the machine that the sales assistant uses to swipe your credit card or to enter your credit card in order to debit the card. When the card is physically entered into the machine, the purchase prices is authorised to be debited.

What is the correct name for this in English. None of my students could tell me what TPE stands for in French either!
Can anyone help?

Oui, yes it is understandable and perhaps the "technical" or formal term.

However, in practice, a shop assistant would never say "please put your card in the electronic payment terminal" as it sounds a bit silly!

purplephoneme said:

However, in practice, a shop assistant would never say "please put your card in the electronic payment terminal" as it sounds a bit silly!

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And, in France, I've never heard insérez votre carte dans le TPE...
(Though I've heard Voilà la gameboy. Tentez votre chance...)

JeanDeSponde said:

And, in France, I've never heard insérez votre carte dans le TPE...

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Moi si, et j’ai été très étonné !
J’ai travaillé dans l’industrie de ce genre de machine, et le mot «TPE» est un mot que je connaissais comme faisant partie du jargon technique de ce métier. J’ai été surpris de découvrir que les commerçants le connaissaient, et qu’ils s’attendaient à ce que leurs clients le connaissent.
Mais c’était sans doute un cas particulier. Pour tout le monde, ce genre de machine s’appelle en France une «machine à cartes bleues», parce que le mot «carte bleue» est la manière dont tout le monde appelle une carte de paiement en France. (C’est une marque déposée.)

JeanDeSponde said:

(Though I've heard Voilà la gameboy. Tentez votre chance...)

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jetset said:

A POS system seems to be common for professionals, but I agree in everyday life you would just say "please insert your card".

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Hi every one
I Hope I am not jumping on this one too late, but I would use Credit Card Terminal, or Electronic Payment Terminal (EPT) for the official name of the peripheral.

POS terminal is fine, but being in the retail software/hardware business, I know that this last one can refer to the till/cash register, which is then connected to a card terminal. And yes: for English training purposes "Please insert your card into the slot/machine, and key in / punch in your (pin) code"
Mimou

Hi! I'm resuscitating this thread because the lack of the everyday word for this in English is still a problem for me. After the shutdown, my church here in Paris started accepting donations on a TPE. I asked myself what I would call the machine in English, and I couldn't think of the term.

I've never worked in retail -- perhaps somebody here has? I agree with all the suggestions above, on the order of "please swipe your card" or "please put your card in the machine." That works in a retailer-to-customer context.

But what if you are working in the store, and somebody asks you to pick up the machine and do something with it? She wouldn't say "bring me the point-of-sale machine." She might say, "bring me the machine," but suppose it's not clear which machine?

The term card reader isn't correct, I don't think, because it is used more for a dongle that street vendors, for example, stick into their smartphones to accept payments.

I'm talking about a machine that has four features: a keypad, a slot for reading cards, a panel for contact-free payment, and a roll of paper inside to produce a receipt.

Yeah, I'll bet that the term payment thingy (or gizmo) is definitely in use somewhere in the English-speaking world!

I agree that the term is accurate -- I just think that, at this point in time, if you gave 100 Americans a piece of paper and asked them to draw a "card reader" they would produce something resembling this (what I found when typing "card reader" into Google images).

[In case the link above doesn't work in future, a Google search in June of 2020 produced a over two hundred images of card readers, only three of which resembled a TPE; many were tiny flat rectangles.]

tswsots said:

LMorland, change your search to "credit card reader." Much better, right?

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Indeed it is! Thank you, @tswsots, you've produced the correct term! At least now I know what to call it on the English-speaking side of my head.

P.S. Fred_C, it seems that, in France, TPE is used more generally now than ever.

LMorland said:

@tswsots, you've produced the correct term!

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It's funny : If you change credit card reader to TPE, you get exactly the same pics.
In France, some people say TPE, but a good part say la machine.

I would say credit card reader, or simply in a transaction, "Please put your card in the card reader." I think that's a good generic description for what in France is called un TPE.

In Canada, according to the GDT, it is known as un lecteur de carte de crédit.

WME said:

A PDQ machine (Process Data quickly) PDQ terminal or credit card machine is a Point of Sale Terminal allowing credit card payments.

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Thank you for this learned explanation.

However, as a native speaker of AE, I would not recommend using this term ("PDQ machine") unless perhaps dealing with professionals in banking or retail -- I certainly have never heard it before!