Bonjour, pour moi, Je suis heureuse pour la chance a pratiquer mon francaise!
Merci, Cathy Crowe

Michel O'Neill wrote:

> 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.
>
> **************************************************************************
> 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]
> **************************************************************************