CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
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 |  Subject: Quebec's statist slime: Language poLICE reverse course about merchant’s Facebook page  Wed Mar 05, 2014 9:58 pm | |
| The Office québécois de la langue française has backed down on demanding that an Ottawa-area merchant translate her Facebook page into French.
“Ultimately, it’s a victory,” Eva Cooper, the owner of Delilah in the Parc in Chelsea, said on Tuesday after an OQLF official told her she could continue to post messages primarily in English, as long as she includes some French as well.
“The Office québécois de la langue française wants this to be over,” she said.
Last month, Cooper got a letter from the OQLF threatening legal action unless she started posting all of the content on her clothing boutique’s Facebook page in French. The case made headlines across Canada last week when Cooper refused to comply.
Likes on Cooper’s Facebook page soared to more than 10,000 this week from only 600 last week.
If convicted of violating Quebec’s French Language Charter, she could have faced a fine ranging from $1,500 to $20,000.
Cooper is bilingual, but posts mostly in English, even though she occasionally writes messages in French.
On Sunday, the OQLF’s director of investigations, Martin Bergeron, left Cooper a phone message. When she called him back the next day, Bergeron “was very conciliatory,” Cooper said.
He said the OQLF was prepared to let the matter drop, providing she continued to post some French content, she said.
According to Cooper, Bergeron told her: “As long as there appears to have some French in your posting, we are good to go.”
She said she read to Bergeron over the phone a Facebook post from earlier that day welcoming the month of March and touting a new line of shoes. It had two sentences in English and one in French, and Bergeron said that was fine, Cooper said.
OQLF spokesperson Jean-Pierre Le Blanc was also singing a different tune on Tuesday.
Last week, Le Blanc told The Gazette there had to be a French version of every post on the boutique’s Facebook page.
“It’s a commercial page and not just a page for conversation. Since it’s for commercial use, the law says that in Quebec, if you are selling products or if you are offering services, you must do it in French,” he said.
But on Tuesday, he said it wasn’t necessary to post everything in French after all.
“The other day, maybe I didn’t express myself clearly,” Le Blanc said.
“With Facebook and that kind of media, there is a difference. It’s not just advertising, there is conversation and posts,” he said.
A lot of that content is just conversational, so it’s not necessary for it to be in French, he said.
“People seem to be very emotional about Facebook. People have their page, they have their friends, they have conversations. And also there’s the fact that it’s seen as being without a country, it’s virtual,” Le Blanc added.
He denied that he was delivering a different message from last week.
“If I look at what I was saying, I think I’m saying the same thing, but I’m using different words, because we’ve clarified a little bit the part that people didn’t understand,” he said.
The OQLF does not comb through social media for language infractions, but it does follow up on complaints, Le Blanc said.
http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/Language+police+reverse+course+about+merchant+Facebook+page/9579027/story.html |
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