By Margaret Wiens
The primary purpose of the Official Languages Act of 1969 is to ensure respect for English and French as the official languages of Canada and to ensure equality of status for their use in all federal institutions. The implication of this law is that translation will always be a part of the federal government’s work and day-to-day operations. The same, however, cannot be said for provincially run bodies or any other content, whether it be written and distributed in Canada or imported from abroad.
Research shows, for example, that Québécois youth spend more and more time looking at English websites compared to older generations (Zuckerman 2013). This trend indicates that youth are more accepting of and comfortable with Canadian English language and culture, and that they will in turn create content in English in addition to consuming it (Zuckerman), such as advertisements, social media and business websites. This could dramatically limit the Canadian French to English translation field in the near and distant future, in which the only employer of French-English translators would be the federal government. It has already been noted that there is a clear discrepancy in the levels of written and spoken French compared to English across Canada, a legally bilingual country: only about 22% of the population’s mother tongue is French and 17.5% are fully bilingual (Statistics Canada).
Whether these native French speakers prefer to read and write in English is unclear, but a prevalence of English on the Internet has two key negative impacts on both cultures—the deterioration of Canadian French culture and of quality translation.
Native English speakers encounter both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, so much information has been made available in English that we can inform ourselves about any subject with a simple Internet search. On the other hand, we have not been encouraged nor forced to improve our foreign language skills beyond high school-level grammar and vocabulary. In North America, English isolates us: less than 4% of books published are translated in the United States (Heilbron and Sapiro 2007). Foreign cultural perspectives within Canada and from around the world are also lost when writers cannot express themselves in their native language and feel they must switch to English in order to be heard.
In a Canadian context, with a flourishing Québécois culture comes increased professional translation, exchange of information between cultures and a more evolved and rounded country, as the Official Languages Act intended. However, to go even further, Canada must take advantage of its rich multicultural society and take its place in the conversation surrounding “global education, trade and diplomacy” (Government of Canada 2012).
Profile Link: http://modlingua.com/interns/368-margaret-wiens-frencch-english-translator.html
Sources:
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/75-006-x/2013001/article/11795-eng.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language_in_Canada
https://qz.com/96054/english-is-no-longer-the-language-of-the-web/
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/multiculturalism/citizenship.asp
http://www.modlingua.com/translation-research/247-the-global-system-of-translation-a-critical-analysis.html
Writer Margaret Wiens is Canadian French and English Language and Translation Intern at Modlingua, India's No1. certified translation and Language service providers based in New Delhi
