According to this article, Quebec Premier Jean Charest has hinted that he might crack down on the spread of English in the workplace. Apparently French is losing its grip. albeit very slowly, in this Canadian Province.
The report I just completed on Web globalization would seem to support this trend. In 2003, we looked at language use on the Web sites of 121 major multinationals. French Canadian finished 7th overall. In our latest report, we studied 200 Web sites and French Canadian finished 12th overall. Of course, behind this drop were up-and-coming languages like Chinese and Korean.
Still, you have to wonder about the future of a language when the government requires people to speak it.
Conversely, there are groups within the US who want to force federal and state governments not to support Spanish.
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At the Premier doesn’t have the least idea how websites are not localized for French-speaking Quebeckers. They are just mirrors of what is offered to Anglophones. The impression is some localizers think that French Quebeckers are Anglophones who happen to speak a language looking like French. Charest has no idea either how we came to this predicament. We have a tradition of centuries of bad translation. What kind of French is he fostering ? What I hear around too often is English spoken with French words. But nobody wants to hear about the quality of French. Nor the quality of websites. This is for the old-fashioned.
But this site is what I was looking for for months and will be a reference for my present research on the representation of Québec cultures on localized (or so called) websites.