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Tuesday, August 12, 2014

GO Transit forgot how to French

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

someone should be fired lmao

Bicky said...

Oh dear. I think that's elementary school French. *smh*

TomW said...

GO should stop wasting money on producing French-language material.

C.J. Smith said...

^ Agreed

Bicky said...

Government agencies need to provide their material in both official languages as we are an officially bilingual nation.

George said...

The province dictates the signage language.

Metrolinx wastes millions every year so 3 or 4 french-only speakers can use the system.
Oddly enough, the signage must be bilingual but the customer service people don't have to be.

DH said...

Having had travelled into different French speaking provinces I have personally experienced the frustration of not being able to read signs in in own country. The marginal cost of translation, on top of the larger cost of printing, should not preclude GO transit from posting bilingual signs.

There's a French family on the train right now, I doubt they'll be the last 4 French speakers for the year. We are a bilingual nation, we should embrace both languages.

LC said...

Wow... fail indeed.

Am I the only one that thought the graphic (specifically the colouring) looks more like winter than summer? And the train is going down a ski hill?

George said...

This is NOT a bilingual country. Quebec proves that. I have a hard time reading signs in Quebec and as far as I know, it's still a part of my country.

Since the vast majority of languages spoken in the GTA is not French, why must we waste millions pandering to the French language?

The cost is far from marginal. You can't separate translation from printing, maintenance and oversight (Metrolinx has employees dedicated to pandering to the French). It's very expensive and resource wasting.

Anonymous said...

A multilingual person isn't that much more expensive to hire than a unilingual one.

How other province do things poorly shouldn't be an example we strive to emulate, but rather learn from and avoid.

George said...

@Anonymous

Correct but do you deny a unilingual person a job for that reason no matter how good they are at it?

Do we have to strive for what we want to be no matter what the cost and not matter if there is zero return? Pandering to one little-used official language, is pandering to a very very small minority in the GTA.

It's better for Metrolinx to hire bilingual bilingual English and Mandarin/Cantonese employees rather than French. Those languages would be used a lot.

Anonymous said...

Toronto is a city of many languages. I know we are bilingual but surely the rules have to be eased. There is just no practical reason to translate everything into French when we have over 100 languages in play in Toronto. I doubt French is even in the top 10 spoken languages.

How about some Arabic?!

TomW said...

Ontario is not a bilingual province. Neither is Quebec to east or Manitoba to the west. The *only* bilingual province is New Brunswick.

I have no objection to government services being provided in other languages inareas where those languages are commonly spoken. There are communities in northern Ontario that fit that bill.

However, in the GTHA that is not the case. In the Toroto CMA (which include Peel, York, and half of Durham), French is spoken a first language by around 1.1% of the population - fewer than Italian (3.2%), Cantonese (3.2%) and Panjabi (Punjabi) (3.0%). (Source : http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/as-sa/fogs-spg/Facts-cma-eng.cfm?LANG=Eng&GK=CMA&GC=535 )

No other GTHA transit agency provides material in French; and GO doesn't even do bilingual announcements in trains or buses. It's pure tokenism to do it in printed material, and hence a waste of money.

TomW said...

P.S: as for people complaining about not being able to read signs in Quebec... that's because it's majority French-speaking. Deal with it. (I don't think Qubec should ban English-language signs, not should people there should feel obligated to provdie them).