Montreal City Weblog

Kate 21:44 on 2020-10-14 Permalink Reply  

• Kevin 22:43 on 2020-10-14 Permalink

  My pearls! Where are my pearls?

• steph 08:38 on 2020-10-15 Permalink

  Many towns across the province are losing their bilingual status, to have it they need a 50% anglophone population. Even Westmount is avoiding a new census, they were at 54% in 2011. Which politician is going to put their foot in their mouth to proclaim “Cest la faute des immigrants”?

• JaneyB 10:26 on 2020-10-15 Permalink

  How could RDP and Lachine be non-conforming, I wonder. They’re almost entirely Francophone.

  @steph I did not know this. Could Westmount really lose its ability to operate in English?

• Kevin 11:28 on 2020-10-15 Permalink

  Quebecor is losing its mind over a “certificate of francisation” which requires, among other things, changing the labels on tools and equipment to be in French, sending out emails reminding employees that we speak French in Quebec, and taking part in Francofetes.

  So if every employee is mother-tongue francophone but the new microwave says “start”, or the TV remote in the break room says “on/off”, or if there’s an English-language manual in the glove compartment of a company vehicle, you can lose your certification.

• Kate 11:34 on 2020-10-15 Permalink

  It can be very counterproductive. I know graphic design software, and it has a lot of terminology that’s widely used and understood in English. If I need to find out how to do something I haven’t done before, I Google for it – in English. If you’re forced to use that software in French (as the government wishes) it cuts you off from making easy quick searches for solutions, because most of that help is out there on the web – in the English terminology.

  I have one old client who’s from Europe and his stuff’s all in French. Now and then he calls on me to fix things that have gone weird on his ancient crock of a Mac. I like him, so I go around and have a look at it – or I did, pre-pandemic. I learned that the first thing I need to do is switch the OS to English because it was impossible trying to work the problems out via French.

  I’m sure this kind of thing extends into other fields.

• JP 11:40 on 2020-10-15 Permalink

  Science and things that are medicine-related are English-heavy. It sucks for all languages, not just French.

  I used to work for a company that changed everything to French (computers, printers, vending machine, etc.) for the visit, and then changed it all back to English as soon as they were gone.

  Now that we’re working from home, I wonder if they’d want to go into people’s homes to see if people’s computers are set to English or French…I sure hope not…ugh.

  For the record, I do speak French relatively well, and enjoy speaking it. But the language of my work (science/med-related) is English.

• Kate 11:45 on 2020-10-15 Permalink

  This reminds me of an anecdote about a small graphic design studio that used to exist downtown. I didn’t work there but I knew the people, a man and woman from here who owned the studio, and their designer, a unilingual anglo who’d grown up out west. This would’ve been late 1980s, early 1990s.

  They had bid on a design contract – some tourism PR magazine type thing funded by the Quebec government – so an inspector came around to assess their grasp of French. He spoke to the couple for awhile, the designer working away in the background. Then the inspector turned and addressed a question to the designer, who simply didn’t register he’d been spoken to.

  Thinking quickly, the woman said, “Oh! It’s no use to speak to him, he’s a wonderful worker but stone deaf, poor thing.” (He wasn’t.)

  They got the contract.

• Ian 17:36 on 2020-10-15 Permalink

  Don’t tell them HTML tags & CSS attributes can only be written in English (with American spelling!) or they’ll ban the internet.

• Michael Black 18:07 on 2020-10-15 Permalink

  Be quiet or they’ll decide Quebec needs its own markup language, websites online in Quebec.

  Or some retrofit that auto translates, and adding overhead to every transfer.

• Ian 18:12 on 2020-10-15 Permalink

  LBHT – langage de balisage hypertexte
  FSC – Feuilles de style en cascade

  or they can just browse in Chrome with auto translate on – look, everything is in French now! haha 😉

• Jaye 19:10 on 2020-10-15 Permalink

  Can municipalities still lose their bilingual status? I don’t think that ever passed…
  https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/pq-government-officially-drops-bill-14-1.2427829

• jeather 08:59 on 2020-10-16 Permalink

  I spoke to a design agency who had had meetings with the provincial government to create a whole secondary internet design/programming language in French, but that idea has been laid to rest, thankfully.