An entente (pronounced in the French manner, "ahn-TAHNT") is a friendly understanding or agreement between two or more parties, particularly governments, or a reference to the group who are parties to such an agreement. An entente is comparatively informal; it isn't strictly an alliance, but more of an alignment, just cooperation on some action or policy.
It comes from the French word entente, understanding, from Old French entente, intent, and eventually from Latin intendere, from in- (toward) + tendere (to stretch). French was the language of European diplomacy into the 20th century, and thus this word came into English to describe relationships between countries whether or not any French-speaking countries are actually involved. (For example, the Fall 2002 issue of Middle East Quarterly contains an article by Ilan Berman called "Israel, India, and Turkey: Triple Entente?")
Entente is also the name of a set of translation programs from Entente Corporation in Boulder, Colorado. Entente claims it program will produce "live, two-way, conversational translation" between any two of the following languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Serbo-Croatian. It is supposed to ignore grammatical niceties to produce a broken but understandable version of the necessary language for a traveler.
"The Entente - World War I Battlefields" is a computer game based on the events of World War I, in which one can play military campaigns of Russia, France, Germany, the Austrian Empire or Britain. (If this site's Russian-language page is reliable, the word "entente" seems to have been absorbed into Russian as well, since the title of the game on that page is the word rendered in Cyrillic letters rather than translated to some equivalent word.)
Sources:
http://wordsmith.org/words/entente.html
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=entente&r=67
http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn?stage=1&word=entente
http://www.free-definition.com/Entente.html
http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entries/81/e0158100.html
http://www.entente-cordiale.org/en/actu.php?rub=4
http://www.meforum.org/article/504
http://www.diac.com/~entente/
http://www.entente.net/
http://www.gmxmedia.net/entente/ | 
