I was the only one who said much about Quebec, and what I said broke down into:
- information about the legal professions in Quebec: neutral
- opinion about the quality of the official English in Quebec: informed
I'm very informed about the quality of the English used in official circles in Quebec -- in legislation, for instance -- since I work with it every day. It's quite ugly much of the time.
There are different reasons for the ugliness. In the case of the Civil Code, there are three basic ones:
- the civil law concepts being expressed have no counterparts in the common law, and things have been made up that either are meaningless to the English ear or conflict with the meanings that the terms already have in English (and this has operated in the other direction as well)
- the translations done back in the 19th century were crappy, in terms of English syntax and drafting conventions and the like (and again, the same is true of the French in federal legislation in the past)
- the translations done when the Civil Code was rewritten a decade and a half ago were crappy, in the same ways (on the other hand, the French versions of federal legislation are no longer just inappropriate translations of the English)
These factors apply to a lot of English in Quebec outside of legislation. Just as some of them apply to French in English-speaking Canada. The big problem with bilingualism is that people fail to recognize the
differences between the languages, thinking that they can speak the other language just by saying something that sounds right to
their ear, because it would sound right in their own language, but it sounds atrocious to anyone who is a native speaker of the language they are speaking.
I'm fed to the teeth with talk about somebody working on a "file" or being responsible for a "file". There is no "global warming file", for instance. That's a nonsense in English. Just because one says "
dossier" in French, that doesn't mean one says "file" in English.
And I'm fed to the teeth with being called "Mrs." by every government clerk I talk to. I fought the misogyny of the Miss/Mrs. crap in English for decades. A "Mrs." is a woman who thought little enough of her own name and identity that she swapped them for her husband's; I have never done that. It is insulting to call me "Mrs." What happened is that no equivalent of "Ms." ever caught on in French, and it gradually became common practice to refer to all adult women as "Mme" (Madame). That's an excellent idea, and it could be done in French because "madame" has broader application than just as an honorific, and didn't carry the same connotations as "Mrs." in English. But it doesn't mean that women are correctly addressed as "Mrs." in English.
And if I have to put up with six more years of hearing the Governor General referred to in English as "Madame" I'm gonna puke. If the GG were a man, would we be calling him "Monsieur"? Well, some fools would be, if he were a francophone, because they don't seem to grasp the idea that the thing is just an honorific with exact equivalents in the two languages, and gets translated just like any other word, being used to convey a meaning in the language being spoken, just like any other word. "Madame" isn't some fancy shmancy way of referring to a high-ranking woman in English; it isn't a
word in English.
Administrative tribunal members from Montreal used to address me as "Maître" when I appeared before them at hearings held in English. That's just rude, particularly to my clients who did not speak French and did not understand what they were saying. Lawyers are addressed by tribunals in English as "counsel". Lawyers in the English common law tradition do not have honorary titles the way doctors do, and the way lawyers do in many civil law traditions (I got to be "la doctora iverglas" in Cuba). And that's not to mention when tribunal members would just start speaking to me in French in the middle of an English hearing.
Obviously it works both ways. I practised in French too. I once represented a refugee claimant from Haiti who, fortunately, had had a classical education and spoke formal French. The chair of the tribunal was a civil servant from Toronto who had her C level for bilingualism, but simply did not speak adequate French for making life and death decisions based on what she understood the person to be saying. The bizarre outcome was that she decided that my client was not credible -- a determination that is very difficult to make when you are insufficiently sensitive to the nuances of someone's speech -- but that if she had believed her, she would have found her to be a refugee. The other tribunal member, a francophone, said that he believed everything she said but that it was not a sufficient basis for finding her to be a refugee. Go figure
that one. The way I figured it, we'd won -- it only took one of two opinions to win -- but of course that wasn't how the tribunal figured it.
Now, when it comes to avocados ... lawyers are of course called, generally,
avocat in French. And the translation used in Quebec actually is either attorney or advocate ... depending on which bit of translated legislation you're reading at the time.
The grievances over official French at the federal level were long-standing and quite justified. Unfortunately, the pendulum has swung the other way. One effect has been that in their zeal to make the French version of legislation
French, and not a translation, the French versions are often incomprehensible; members of Parliament complain regularly at committee hearings on legislation that the French makes no sense and does not say what it was intended to say. The other is that the English has degenerated horribly, by being made to become what the French used to be -- a translation. For instance, the Official Languages Act -- one of the most awful examples of execrable English in the statutes, bizarrely -- has a part devoted to what it calls a "court remedy". What the fuck is a court remedy? Well, it's a total crap translation of
recours judiciaire, which properly means "application to a court":
recours has a meaning that is not directly translatable in this instance. What follows is a load of garble, in the English, because the
procedure being discussed is not a
remedy at all, it is the procedure for obtaining a remedy.
These are things that irk people on both sides of the language divide, those who care about their own language, probably equally. They're not unique to Canada; they go on, in just as bad if not worse ways, in international organizations and in international instruments. Some of it is just going to happen no matter what; languages are not exact counterparts of one another, and all have to adapt somewhat to convey meanings that are not native to them. But when the fine edge of meaning is lost because of ignorance and arrogance, which it too often is, or when a language's own meanings are supplanted with something else so that only the élite bilingual class can understand what's being said in either language, it's a bad thing.
Here's an example of how it can happen. I attended a large meeting organized by a tenants' association I was representing, to which a staffer from the rent review office had been invited. The tenants were mainly older people, very afraid of the huge rent increase the landlord had applied for. They wanted to know what they could do. The staffer said: "Well, you can assist at the meeting." They said: "Great! what can we do?" She said: "Well, you can assist at the meeting." ... At which point I stepped in and said quietly to her: "I think you're saying they can
assister à the meeting ...
attend the meeting?" (That's one that anglos do in reverse: saying one is going to
attendre something means that one is going to wait for it.)
I encounter the arrogance of francophones who are ignorant of English to an extent they simply won't acknowledge, continually. I'm sure that francophones in my position encounter the anglophone equivalents. Probably not as regularly, of course, because a smaller proportion of anglophones speaks French to start with. But I'm not sure that there has been such a twisting of French to suit English meanings -- those "files" and the like -- as the other way around. It's insidious and it's everywhere. Every time you hear a francophone say, in English, that something is a "preoccupation", you couldn't know the meaning unless you speak French and are sensitive to these things, and make the mental connection to see that the speaker is saying that something is a matter of
concern. Give me five minutes with the national news, and I'll show you a half-dozen more examples. And half of them will be anglophones talking Gallicized nonsense that they've for some reason decided makes them sound clever.
Crappy accents aren't the big problem, it's over-confidence in one's ability to use the language, and it's more disrespectful to one's audience than simply not pronouncing things well. Although I do remember a francophone friend of mine telling me about being at a party with her then-partner, a Montreal city councillor who was an old friend of mine ... and wandering over to the conversation he was in, listening for a minute and deciding he must be speaking Yiddish and wandering off ... only to realize afterward that he'd been speaking French. ;) Guess it worked out for him -- he has another francophone partner now, and a kid being raised francophone.
Anyhow, none of this is "about Quebeckers", I'm sure we all see. A whole lot of very non-Quebecker politicians pretend that there are invisible "files" under their arms, when really there are issues that they're responsible for. It isn't the fault of any Quebecker that some francophone politicians and legislative drafters don't bother to learn the proper way to say things in English, any more than it's my fault that some anglophone politicians and drafters don't do the reverse.
I'm a huge fan of bilingualism, and of collective cultural rights, and a resigned participant in bijuralism -- the fashioning of a legal system that works in both languages/traditions (I just think the job being done of it could be considerably better). They're the foundation of the Canadian identity, and make us virtually unique in the world, and put us in a position to have an enormous positive influence in other societies having to organize ways for different cultural groups to cohabit.
Oh, and btw, as far as I'm concerned "sovereignty" today is just a project (ha, another irksome import from French bureaucratese) of the indigenous Quebec élite, and has lost all vestiges of progressive politics, as self-determination movements unfortunately seem wont to do. The difference here -- from, say, the IRA or the Eritrean separatists -- is that the society has in fact accommodated the minorities (which include francophone communities outside Quebec) and recognized their legitimate aspirations and provided legal and institutional protections and avenues for their expression. Not jumping to hand over control over every dollar that every Quebec provincial government or party in Parliament might demand for the purposes of building its own little empire is no different from declining to hand Ralph Klein the keys to the health care system.
Civil discourse about the place of Quebec in Canada doesn't mean always smiling and never saying anything sharp!
http://radicalpedagogy.icaap.org/content/issue2_1/03Schroeder.htmlThere is an unfortunate tendency to assume that civil discourse has occurred whenever two or more people are nice to each other, say something, and don’t get into an argument. That is misleading on all three counts.
Civil discourse is city speech, implying, as Richard Luecke (1968; 1996) has suggested many times, that it is not only how we speak in cities but also how cities speak.
City speech is not simply or uniformly nice; on the contrary, it is often confrontational and rough. A place in which speech was simply and uniformly nice would be homogeneous and have nothing but smooth edges. I am aware that this may well be what Aristotle (1990) had in mind when he described the city in terms of friendship and excluded those who were not “beautiful” (not to mention those who did not speak Greek) from full participation. But, as Martha Nussbaum (1986) has pointed out, Aristotle truncated his own city at this point and (unfortunately) did not allow himself to be carried away by his method. That method is certainly capable of carrying us to a city with a more inclusive aesthetic. Beauty is defined not by excluding those who do not fit within existing boundaries but by crossing boundaries to acknowledge the fittingness of diversity encountered in the city. Crossing boundaries involves confrontation and is rarely smooth. But that it is part of city speech means that civil discourse has not occurred if boundaries have not been crossed.
Nor is city speech simply a matter of saying something. If it does not also ensure space and time in which to say nothing, the listening essential to discourse becomes impossible. In terms of boundary crossing, this means that civil discourse has not occurred if boundaries that define spaces of sound and spaces of silence have not been recognized and honored. Both sound and silence are crucial if the city is not simply to degenerate into a place of violence.
Finally, and most emphatically, city speech does not avoid argument. In fact, the rhythm of crossing, recognizing, and honoring boundaries is descriptive of the discipline of argument. (Remember the formulation at the beginning of this essay: liberal arts are concerned with discovery, appreciation, orientation, and application—redefined here in terms of crossing, recognizing, and honoring boundaries.) Where there is no argument, there is no civil discourse, and there is no city. Such a place is likely to be defined in one of three ways: either it is surrounded by an essentially impermeable boundary that excludes difference; or it is marked by violent struggle for control of turf; or (most likely) it is a mixture of both, with enforced homogeneity near the center of power and violent struggle for control of turf on the fringes.
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