Les francophones me pardonneront la suite en anglais mais si je
continue dans la langue de Molière, probablement que 80% à 90% des
650 quelques abonnés de la liste ne comprendront rien. Et c'est
précisément l'enjeu que je veux soulever. Alors...

Dear non francophones,

The message in French from one of the students who signed up to
CLICK4HP in my course in health promotion triggered a few other
messages either in French or bilingual (French-English). This was the
first time, to my knowledge at least, that this occured on CLICK4HP
and I was one of the first who signed up when it was launched 3-4
years ago. It raises a couple of interesting issues about how to
function in health promotion on the internet, which I think are
worthwhile to mention.

The first is the imperialism of English as the language of
communication on the net. Like it or not (and many of my fellow
Quebeckers are rather on the not side... as maybe are several others
subscribing to this list from countries where English is not the
national language ), the esperanto of this time is English. Even if
there have been some dramatic increases in the availability of
information on the net in other languages than english, and even if
automated translation is available on more and more search engines,
the reality remains that the internet is still dramatically dominated
by English. So what do you do if you are a non-english speaker ?
Forget your roots, your being, your very self and join the new world
order of capitalism which wants to bulldoze local cultures under the
steamroller of mostly anglophone global cultural products (cf. for
instance what will come out of the recent mega-merger between
Time-Warner and America on line) ??? Read whatever is available in
English but not participate by fear of being unable to express
oneself adequately in English ??? Write in your own language on lists
like this one, but with the result that almost nobody will understand
you ???

Some of these issues are rather internal to Canada, an officially
bilingual (French-English) country but where French is far from being
as utilized as English; there is thus some legitimacy for the
francophones of Canada to write in French on a list based in Canada,
even if it is in Toronto where French is not widely utilized, to say
the least. However, this might be seen as rather parochial for
non-canadians, especially if they dont understand French. What if the
danes or the swedes or the germans or the japanese begin to write in
their own languages on lists like this one ? There might thus be a
value to try to reach the majority and do so in English. But there is
always an additional cost to do so for non-anglophones that the
native anglophones usually tend to forget, if they at all bother...

On top of English as the dominant language of communication, another
issue is the utilisation by non-english people of the internet to
communicate among themselves in their own languages. For several
years, the transmission protocols, almost all designed in the USA,
systematically scraped characters that were not english. For
instance, all accentuated characters in French got totally screwed
up, which forced you to alter your own language when writing an
e-mail because the brain of the computers transmitting the
information was an English one. The protocols to allow more extensive
sets of characters have been available for several years now but the
technical people managing servers have not all modified their
computers accordingly. I would thus like to make a test with this
list, to which over 600 people subscribe from all over the world
(mostly from North-America though) in order to see if accentuated
characters are currently functioning or not. In the first four lines
of this message, there are several words with accentuated characters.
My question is: can you read them or do these characters appear as
squares or are replaced by as meaningful things as =20  or &raquo or
other oddities of the same kind ? If you CANNOT read accentuated
characters properly, would you be kind enough to send me an e-mail at
<[log in to unmask]> with "I cannot read them" as the subjet
of your message ? I will compile them and will get back to the list
with what seems to me the best thing to do, i.e. not to utilize these
characters as there are still too many people unable to read them, or
to utilize them as the standard protocols now seem to tolerate them
???

Merci de votre collaboration ! Thanks for your cooperation !


Une tres bonne journee !

Michel O'Neill, Ph.D.

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Professeur titulaire et Codirecteur, Groupe de recherche et d'intervention
en promotion de la sante (GRIPSUL), Faculte des Sciences infirmieres;
Codirecteur, Centre quebecois collaborateur de l'OMS pour le developpement
de villes et villages en sante / Quebec WHO Collaborating Center for the
development of healthy cities and towns;
4108-J Pavillon Comtois, Universite Laval, Quebec, Qc, Canada, G1K 7P4.
tel: +1-(418)-656-2131 #7431; telecopieur: +1-(418)-656-7747
Courrier electronique: [log in to unmask]
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