As a country with both English and French as official languages, Canada is quickly becoming an embarrassment ahead of the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver:
When the world beats a path to Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympics, many may expect both of Canada's official languages, French and English, to be on full display.
But, zut alors, they could well be disappointed, according to the country's language czar, Graham Fraser.
Appearing yesterday before the House of Commons' official languages committee, Mr. Fraser said organizers of the 2010 Olympics are falling short in their efforts to make the Games sufficiently bilingual.
But there's more:
The federal government, which has a translation bureau with a worldwide reputation for excellence, has provided hardly any assistance to hard-pressed Olympic organizers, Mr. Fraser said.
"There's been this attitude that, 'Oh, that's not really our job, that's not our responsibility and everything's fine.'... The federal government, which does have the expertise, has a whole body of resources that they should be discussing with VANOC."
Unfortunately, this is not quite true. Translation and interpreting services provided by the federal agency are often substandard and sometimes performed by people who don't meet even the most basic professional standards.
For example, the Translation Bureau has been known to award contracts to one particular individual in Toronto who then, without the knowledge of the Bureau and against Bureau policies, farms out the work to "translators" all over the world – to make matters worse, he regularly defrauds his subcontractors by never paying them.
The Bureau has been notified by several translators about that individual, yet still continues to send work to him.
What is more, the Bureau has its own certification/accreditation process for translators and interpreters, which is completely unnecessary, as both the federal and provincial associations already have such a system in place – and theirs is of a higher quality than the standards applied by the federal government.
As a result, the quality of Bureau translators and interpreters is often far below that of translators and interpreters accredited by the professional associations.
Bureau interpreters, for example, regularly interpret into a "B" or "C" language, rather than exclusively into the "A" language (A being the interpreter's mother tongue). English Canadians who want to follow proceedings in the federal parliament are therefore treated to "English" interpretations with thick and often unintelligible French accents. Quite often, too, those interpreters produce a kind of franglais that makes most people's hair stand on end: in this context, I always give as an example that francophone Bureau interpreter with a really thick accent who rendered "dans un café" as "in a coffee" several times in a row in such phrases as "We discussed it while sitting in a coffee".
I don't know about others, but I certainly wouldn't consider this "a worldwide reputation for excellence."
That is exactly what happens when saving money on translation...
Posted by: tomedes | April 23, 2009 at 03:03 PM