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Quebec Language Police Target Store Owner's Facebook Page
New submitter wassomeyob writes "In Canada, the province of Quebec has their Official Language Act of 1974 (aka Bill 22) which makes French their sole official language. It has famously been used to force business owners to modify signage to give French pre-eminance over other languages. Now, the Quebec language police seem to be extending their reach to Facebook. Eva Cooper owns Delilah in the Parc — a shop in Chelsea, Quebec near the Quebec/Ontario border. She received a letter from the language office telling her to translate everything posted on her store's Facebook page into French."
"it needs to"
How fucked up has the world become where everyone gets to decide what a store owner "needs to" do but the store owner.
THL phish sticks
Its important to a small zealot minority. I'm also french Canadian and have lived there most of my life. There's a couple of people who are impossibly vocal about it. The rest don't care or even dread it. They do a heck of a lot more than give slaps on the wrists, with daily fines and penalties, forcing companies to have "councils" that oversee usage of the language, etc.
The only reason stuff like Best Buy is still Best Buy, is because you can negotiate. I worked for a very large international company that opened an office in Montreal. They couldn't realistically comply with all the laws, so they were making deals: one of the deal was to have everyone, including english-only speakers, have only access to french computers/operating systems/keyboards and not be allowed to change them.
Yeah, that was a pain.
I worked for another that was almost exclusively english speakers. We were still forced to translate all our reports in french, including the one offs that were only read by a single specific executive who didn't even know french.
In the end, it hurts competitiveness on a global level. There's a reason salaries are so much lower in Montreal than in other large Canadian cities. The cost of doing business is just insane. So I left.