Tag Archives: language

| Canadiens, Opinion

Was that supposed to be French?

To the public announcer at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto,

You should be fired. Like, immediately.

Or am I being too demanding in suggesting that someone who works as a public announcer at a hockey game should be able to speak both of Canada’s official languages?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice that there were bilingual announcements tonight, but that mockery of the langue de Molière brings shame upon a city that you’d think couldn’t look worse in the eyes of the rest of the country.

P.S. For those watching tonight’s Habs/Leafs matchup, Mike Boone has his liveblog at Habs Inside/Out.

| Humour, On the Net, Opinion

Têtes à claques en anglais

The Quebec-based online video sensation Têtes à claques has soft-launched a new website and and anglo version with passable anglo accents.

The videos are the same as the franco versions, but they seem to lose some of the humour in translation. I’m not quite sure what it is, exactly. Maybe I’m just more easily amused by francophone humour. Maybe the québécois accent does something to make stuff sound more funny.

(via Domster, among others)

Meanwhile, Le Devoir today has a letter about francophone singers releasing anglo albums. Of course, it’s filled with the usual anti-English xenophobia you’d expect out of Le Devoir, but the gist of the letter is that artists shouldn’t be selling themselves short recording in another language just for the money, even if the English market is insanely lucrative:

La chanson est un art qui mérite le respect.

The writer is talking about Garou and Gregory Charles.

Yeah.

| Opinion

“Nuked the fridge”? Please

There are plenty of expressions in the English language whose origins are unknown to younger generations. Knowing their etymology isn’t really important, after all, so long as everyone understands the usage.

So why do people feel necessary to replace “jumped the shark,” which references a Happy Days episode that people believe is an example of a TV series going past the point when writers have any original ideas consistent with the show’s original concept, with another term that means the exact same thing?

Or perhaps, like everyone else, the New York Times is struggling to find summer filler material for its newspaper.

| Video

Ceci est Sparta indépendantiste

Does anyone else find the music attached to this video unnecessarily menacing?

Is it that they want people to hate them, or do they think this is going to become some sort of armed conflict and The One True Way will prevail gloriously?

I’ll could also point out the irony of uploading a Parti indépendantiste video that’s militantly anti-English to a website that doesn’t have a French (or at least Québécois) version.

| Montreal, Movies

This is how to bring the two solitudes together

Something you don’t see that often: A Quebec film screening at Dollar Cinema.

Sci-fi parody flick Dans une galaxie près de chez vous 2 (not to be confused with Kung Fu Creatures on the Rampage 2) is playing there twice a day until Thursday. Here’s a review from when it first came out in April from The Gazette’s Brendan Kelly.

| On the Net, Opinion, Web design

Français go home, says Toronto

RadCan’s Sur le Web makes an interesting point (I’d link to the post directly, but I can’t) today about the Tourism Toronto website (which should probably be called the Toronto Tourism site considering its URL, but who am I to judge?) that was featured in a recent Globe and Mail article about the increase in domestic tourism to the city.

Tourism Toronto doesn’t have a French version.

It took me about five minutes to find the links to different language versions (they’re on the bottom of the page), in the form of flags for different countries under the banner “international sites.” There’s a Chinese version, a Korean version, a Japanese version and a Spanish version. But no French. (Incidentally, there are flags for Spain and Argentina which link to TorontoTourismMexico.com, which I’m sure isn’t going to offend anyone, right?).

I haven’t asked the site’s creators what their motives are, because that’s no fun. So let’s speculate about them here. Did they forget? Are Korean tourists more valuable than French ones? Is there some other website for francophone Canadian tourists? Are they trying to get back at us for winning the bagel war?

| In the news, Media

The reasonable accommodation debate begins again

The Gazette’s Jeff Heinrich today has an OMGEXCLUSIVE!!!!11 on the salient facts that will make their way into the Bouchard-Taylor Commission report. It’s in a bunch of parts:

  • The main story, which boils down the conclusions to: learn about immigrants (especially Muslims) and be nice to them; and learn more English
  • A list of common fallacies in arguments against accommodation
  • A sidebar on the need to learn more English, which will no doubt be interpreted not as “we need to be more multilingual like world-leading countries” but as “we need to surrender to the unilingual anglos who will enslave us”
  • Some comments from members of the commission not named Bouchard or Taylor
  • Criticisms from UQAM prof and commission adviser Jacques Beauchemin, calling the report a “whitewash”

There’s also a piece noting that Taylor has been named one of the world’s top 100 public thinkers, an editorial praising the commissioners, a soundoff forum for people’s comments, and a post-publication reaction story from the premier (he’s not saying anything) and others, including Mouvement Montréal français (I won’t spoil the surprise)

I don’t know how Heinrich obtained the parts of the report he bases his stories on (maybe he found them in a cab?), but I’m sure plenty of ink will be spilled noting that it was the anglo paper that got the scoop on a commission report that says we should learn English.

Meanwhile, my bosses are (insert disgusting metaphor for happiness here) that the competition is all over talking about their scoop (it was even in Le Monde!). Patrick Lagacé blogs about it (and the comments give a pretty good idea of why this commission was needed in the first place). Maisonneuve also has (coincidentally) a story about the commission from yesterday.

My take

Anyone who expected the commission report to magically solve the issue is clearly fooling themselves. It simply won’t do that. So then the question becomes what we spent all that money on. Was it just a chance for people from the régions to vent about immigrants they’ve never met? Or was it something to clearly define what the issues are so we can slowly work through them? Either way, expect a lot of people to be angry.

And anger is what the commission brought out more than anything else. It made racism, xenophobia and all sorts of discrimination acceptable and normal by allowing people a forum to express it.

As the Habs riot showed us, crowds are like children. Without proper discipline, they revert to the intelligence of an infant.

This problem isn’t unique to Quebec. The U.S. has the same issue with immigration: the media and politicians practice open discrimination, and that makes it acceptable for everyone else to do the same.

One of the knee-jerk reactions we’ve already seen is that francophones are the ones expected to do the accommodating while anglos don’t have to change. I don’t think that’s the point. Anglos already have to learn French here, otherwise they won’t get jobs in public service (outside of Fairview anyway). Statistics show that those who are bilingual make far more than their unilingual counterparts, anglo or franco. So the solution is to make sure both language groups get education in both languages, no?

I think there’s an even more fundamental issue that wasn’t explored here, and one that would have pissed francophone activists off more than anything else: Is it still in our best interest as a world society to preserve minority languages? So many conflicts can be boiled down to communication difficulties, and so many of those can be boiled down to translation problems. What would be so bad if the entire world spoke just one language, whether it be English, French, Latin, Esperanto or Mandarin?

And what about the media?

The commission thinks it went a bit far, and the media will no doubt disagree. I think the real answer (as always) lies somewhere in between. The media (especially tabloids like the Journal) overhyped the issue, which is a large reason why people who have no real connection with immigrants became so frightened. On the other hand, the media only serve to reflect society, and there was clearly some latent xenophobia there to exploit.

| Media, Opinion

Anglo ads on franco websites?

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but some astute francophone bloggers are noting English-only advertisements on French-language websites like Cyberpresse and Le Devoir.

Assuming it’s not a technical malfunction or clueless advertising agency, should it be a scandal that an ad on a French-language website be in English? A lot of anglophones read French newspapers, watch French television and go to French websites when they can’t find what they need in English. Why not put forward some ads that cater to them?

For example: If The Gazette put a TV ad on RDS during a Habs game to promote its Habs Inside/Out website, in order to reach anglophone Habs enthusiasts who can’t watch the game on another network, or francophone fanatiques who want to immerse themselves in everything about Les Glorieux, would that be so bad?

Or if an anglophone school board had ads in French promoting… oh wait, they already did that. And people are pissed.

| Media, Opinion

Bilingual doesn’t mean French at Carleton

In a move sure to piss off francophones from coast to coast, Carleton University’s journalism department has decided that students no longer have to demonstrate a proficiency in French to graduate. (via J-Source)

Considering that half the summer interns The Gazette picks every year come from Carleton (the other half tend to come from Concordia), this seems like a bad idea.

As Graham Fraser, Canada’s official languages commissioner, points out, this isn’t just about journalists working in Quebec. Even those in Victoria will occasionally have to find themselves translating French text into English to understand a story better.

Carleton’s reasoning, and I suppose it’s understandable to a point, is that many students choose to work elsewhere (like outside the country) when they graduate. And many of those students come from elsewhere in the first place. They have no use for French.

But if that’s the reasoning, why bother having language proficiency at all? They require students to have a basic understanding of English and now another language of their choice. What’s the point if not to have the proper skills to practice journalism in Canada? Should learning about Canadian libel law also be optional for people who expect to work overseas?

| Media, Montreal

Stupid

From Barry Wilson’s CTV News Postscript blog:

WHAT WAS THAT LINE FROM FOREST GUMP?
STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES.
SO YOU HAVE THESE IDIOTS FROM SOME COCKAMAMIE SEPARATIST GROUP THREATENING TO TRY TO JOIN IN ON SUNDAY’S ST PATRICK’S DAY PARADE
THEY COMPLAIN THE PARADE IS TOO ENGLISH.
SO? THERE POINT IS?

Ad hominem attacks on language issues are always best done with blatant grammatical errors in your mother tongue.

| Business, In the news, Media, Montreal, Opinion

The McKibbin’s kinda-non-story

I should give fair play to Jamie Orchard. My last post about her blog was unflattering. But her latest post, about the whole McKibbin’s language-police debacle, is much more interesting:

The OLF insists that all the owner has to do is write back and explain that the signs are artifacts. In fact, when the OLF saw our TV footage of the signs, they said right away the case could be solved easily – here’s the quote from Gerald Paquette:

There are many Irish pubs in Quebec that have these kinds of artifacts and they have all asked for an exception.”

We told this to the owner of the pub on Thursday, and he seemed relieved. But then, on Friday, the co-owner of the pub was on talk radio insisting that he would have to go to court to fight this, making a big show of inviting the premier to his pub to look at the signs, insisting he would refuse to pay the fine. He was getting all the sympathy in the world from the host, from the callers, from everyone, and never once did he mention it could all be solved with a simple letter.

I like this post (especially compared to the previous one) for two reasons:

  1. It’s a simple, rational, thought-out opinion rather than an uninformed reactionary “stupid OLF” rant
  2. It brings some new information to the table (Global’s conversation with the bar’s owner) that is perfectly placed in a journalist’s blog.

I’m not going to leave the OLF (actually the OQLF) off the hook entirely, since they did, in fact, bring up these signs in their complaint (which was from a customer who said he wasn’t served in French and an outdoor menu was in English only).

But it’s clear the media (and I have to include myself here, since I edited the big article in Friday’s Gazette about it) played up the signs and outrage campaign while burying the other complaints and the comments from the OQLF that they could easily get an exemption. (Second-day stories are pointing these things out, but that wouldn’t have been necessary if they weren’t buried in the first place.)

And McKibbin’s owners are clearly using this as an excuse to launch an anti-OQLF publicity campaign to boost anglo business and line their pockets with outrage money (or just get their name in the news). They’ve already got a Facebook group. And another. And another. And another. And another.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere:

UPDATE (Feb. 27): A video on YouTube shows the original letter from the OQLF to McKibbin’s, which clearly is much more about the posters than the office later suggested to reporters. Also plenty of discussion on some franco forums.