Common Practices in the Quebec Translation Milieu with Respect to Canadian English Usage

York, Christine

doi:https://doi.org/10.7202/1107569ar

Introduction

Considerable attention has been paid to the impact on the translation process of the widespread adoption of technologies like translation memories, terminology management tools, speech-recognition software and machine translation. These tools have upended traditional methods for producing finished translations, for example by obliging translators to work segment by segment or non-linearly or to recycle and piece together parts of existing translations (see LeBlanc, 2014; Doherty, 2016), by shifting the bulk of the translator’s task to editing and intervening in various ways on machine translation output (see Lommel, 2017), and by offering alternative text input modes via speech-to-text technology and user interfaces that go beyond the mouse and keyboard (see Stasimoti, 2022; Moorkens and O’Brien, 2017). But translation research methods have also evolved, as translators gradually abandon print resources in favour of online ones. In addition to their role in aiding comprehension, reference materials like dictionaries are generally seen as authoritative in matters of spelling and style, and they allow writers to maintain conformity to specific language varieties like British, American, and Canadian English. What happens if they are infrequently updated, whether in print or online format, or if translators become less reliant on them? Given that one of the major Canadian English reference books, The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (COD), was last published in 2004, translators working from French and other languages into English, as well as other language professionals, have had to complement their research with other sources. What has been the impact on their common practices, particularly in the Quebec translation milieu?

As a long-time translation instructor and former self-employed translator who witnessed the transition from paper-based procedures to word processing and then to translation technologies,[1] I wanted to ascertain the impact of evolving research methods and the lack of up-to-date reference materials on the habits of working translators. In particular, since translators and other language professionals can exert a strong influence on language use, I was interested in the way those working in Canada and Quebec follow the spelling, style and vocabulary of Canadian English as a language variety. Canadian English is notable in two ways: for the presence of French as a co-official language at the federal government level, leading to numerous borrowings and influences (Chambers, 2010; Fee, 2008), and for its position as a settler colonial variety of English (Denis and Darcy, 2018) whose vocabulary reflects contact with Indigenous languages. Accordingly, one might expect those aspects to provide ongoing challenges to translators in the current environment. I decided to investigate the practices and decision-making processes of Canadian and Quebec translators who work into English and whose main source language is French. I focused on three areas of Canadian English: spelling and style issues like capitalization and italics; maintenance of French terms, expressions and names of organizations in English texts; and treatment of names, place names and other terms related to Indigenous Peoples. The study was composed of a survey, carried out between March 10 and April 15, 2022, and semi-directed interviews completed between April 15 and May 5, 2022.[2] This article will provide some background on the position of Canadian English within the World Englishes paradigm and then discuss the methodology and results of the study.

1. The World Englishes Paradigm

The English language is what British linguist David Crystal calls a global language, in that it has worldwide spread and is spoken by large numbers of people as a mother tongue, by millions more as an official language with institutional support, and by even greater numbers as a foreign language, with by some estimates a quarter of the world’s population having at least some competence in English (2008, p. 5). It is the sole “hypercentral” language within the sociological model developed by Abram de Swaan, in which he posits a global language system held together by multilingual speakers that locates English at its centre—“at the hub of the linguistic galaxy”—surrounded by twelve “supercentral” languages, about a hundred “central” languages, whose speakers often communicate via these widely spread acquired and native languages, and thousands of “peripheral” languages, which have smaller numbers of speakers and are rarely used to connect to any other languages (2001, pp. 4-6). English is also the most used language on the Internet, with 54% of websites having content in English,[3] and it is the language of global business, science, international relations, travel, tourism and many other fields (Schneider, 2011, p. 341). As one writer put it, “Behemoth, bully, loudmouth, thief: English is everywhere, and everywhere, English dominates. […] No language in history has been used by so many people or spanned a greater portion of the globe” (Milanowski, 2018, n.p.). However, due to its historical development, global range and number of speakers, the English language cannot be considered a single entity, but is characterized by such extensive geographic and social differentiation that it is best understood in the plural form “Englishes,” reflecting the diversity of its many subtypes and varieties (Mesthrie and Bhatt, 2008, pp. 3-7).

The field of research known as World Englishes initially developed in the early 1980s, as scholars sought to account for the differing features of the numerous varieties of English, considering them not in isolation but within a global context that grew out of British colonialism. An influential figure in this subfield of sociolinguistics was Braj B. Kachru, who argued that a standardized form based on British English should not be the model for teaching and learning. Instead, he posited the now well-known Three Circles Model, which places the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand—“the traditional bases of English”—in the inner of three concentric circles. In the Outer Circle are countries like Nigeria, Singapore and India, where due to their colonial history English is spoken by bilingual or multilingual speakers and has institutional support and major status in language policy. In the third circle, which Kachru calls the Expanding Circle, are countries like China and Indonesia, where English is taught in some schools and spoken as a foreign language without having an official role (1985, pp. 12-15). Whereas the varieties of the Inner Circle were traditionally seen as “norm-providing,” those of the Outer Circle, in frequent contact with other languages, are “norm-developing” and can be the source of innovations and creativity, while those of the Expanding Circle are “norm-dependent” (ibid., pp. 16-17).

In the decades since Kachru proposed his tripartite model, it has come under criticism for, among other aspects, its failure to account for social and ethnic minorities and Indigenous Peoples within countries (Schneider, 2011, pp. 345-346). While recognizing the model’s impact, Paul Bruthiaux (2003) notes that it overlooks dialectal variation within Inner Circle varieties, such as Black English, that it glosses over differences in language competence among multilingual speakers in Outer Circle countries, and that it is overly focused on the nation-state; he points out that the model should be able to capture the operations of other languages of international communication, like French. A more recent proposition is Edgar Schneider’s Dynamic Model of Postcolonial Englishes (2007), which posits that the spread of English under British colonial rule followed an essentially uniform process of sociolinguistic interaction between immigrant settlers and Indigenous populations. The process has five phases: (1) foundation, as English is introduced to new territories and language contact occurs mainly through translators and interpreters; (2) exonormative stabilization, with increased bilingualism; (3) nativization, with English adapting to local sociopolitical and cultural practices; (4) endonormative stabilization, with codification and acceptance of the new variety of English as part of identity; and (5) differentiation, as the postcolonial nation defines its own status and as regional dialects and sociolects emerge (ibid., pp. 32-55).

While Canadian English is clearly located within Kachru’s Inner Circle (Melchers et al., 2019, pp. 84-92), Schneider considers that it has reached phase 5 in his Dynamic Model and is now characterized by an openness to cultural diversity (2007, pp. 247-248). However, in what they describe as a position paper, Canadian researchers Derek Denis and Alexandra D’Arcy[4] critique Schneider’s blanket use of the term Postcolonial English for a wide range of colonial contexts. They point out that in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, there has been no decolonization, and colonialism continues to exist in the form of “settler colonialism” (2018, p. 4). They note that settler colonial systems differ from other colonial contexts in that they aim for the expropriation of land and the very eradication of Indigenous populations, rather than the exploitation of precolonial populations as labour (ibid., pp. 6-7). Such was the intent of the Canadian government, which explicitly sought to assimilate Indigenous Peoples through residential schools, land seizures, forced relocation, outlawing of spiritual practices, banning of languages, and other measures—a policy deemed “cultural genocide” in the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015, p. 3).

Denis and D’Arcy argue that the term “settler colonial Englishes” is more appropriate to describe the varieties that exist under the ongoing policies and practices of settler colonialism, and they set out some key differences from Postcolonial Englishes. While Schneider’s Dynamic Model posits that they emerge from a process of convergence and “mutual negotiation” between English-speaking settlers and Indigenous populations, Denis and D’Arcy note that “the development of English under settler colonialism is not a matter of convergence but of absorption” (2018, pp. 10-11). Thus, for example, in India and Singapore, Indigenous languages have influenced the structure of the new Englishes, with loanwords in numerous domains, contact-induced grammatical innovations, and regional differences reflecting linguistically diverse populations (ibid., pp. 11-22). In Canada, by contrast, Indigenous languages played little role in the development of Canadian English other than in toponymy and a limited number of vocabulary items, and virtually all of the 86 languages spoken by First Nations, Inuit and Métis in Canada are considered by UNESCO to be vulnerable or endangered.[5] Denis and D’Arcy’s critique provides an important updating of our understanding of the place of Canadian English in the World Englishes paradigm and forms the underpinning of this article’s discussion of the subject.

2. The Emergence of Canadian English as an Autonomous Variety

2.1 Languages in Canada

English is the most widely spoken language in Canada, but it is not, of course, the only one: the 2021 Statistics Canada Census shows that over 250 languages are spoken in the country. Within a population of 36.6 million, 20.1 million people report having a mother tongue of English, 7.2 million a mother tongue of French, and 7.8 million “non-official languages,” a category that includes Indigenous languages, immigrant languages, and sign languages.[6] The languages spoken by the original inhabitants of the land belong to 12 major families: Inuit, Michif (Métis), and 10 First Nations families, five of which—Salish, Tsimshian, Wakashan, Kutenai and Haida—are found mainly in British Columbia while the others—Algonquian, Athabaskan, Siouan, Iroquoian and Tlingit—span several provinces and territories. One of the consequences of the residential school system, under which Indigenous children were forbidden to speak their mother tongues, is that today only 13.1% of the Indigenous population reports the ability to conduct a conversation in an Indigenous language. However, there is evidence that a growing number of First Nations, Inuit and Métis people are learning Indigenous languages as second languages along with English or French, suggesting that recent efforts to preserve and revitalize these languages are having some effect.[7]

The 21.4% of the Canadian population for whom French is the first official language spoken are concentrated in Quebec, with another one million Francophones living in New Brunswick, Manitoba, Ontario and other provinces and territories. The majority are descendants of the inhabitants of New France, who lived in colonies starting in the 17th century in what is now Quebec, eastern Canada and parts of the United States. Rivalry between two colonial powers, France and Great Britain, extended to the North American colonies and culminated in the Seven Years’ War, which led to the fall of New France in 1760. Following the Treaty of Paris in 1763, most of France’s empire in North America came under the control of Great Britain, but Francophones were not entirely assimilated. When the Dominion of Canada was formed in 1867, the Constitution stipulated that both English and French would be used in courts, Parliament and the Legislature of Quebec. In 1969, Canada passed the Official Languages Act, which introduced official bilingualism in the federal government (see Leclerc, 2018, n.p.). In Quebec, with the growth of the nationalist movement and the political, cultural and social reforms of the 1960s, language became a point of identity. To compel immigrants to integrate into French and ensure that Francophones could live and thrive in their own language, the Quebec government adopted the Charter of the French Language in 1977, making French “the language of Government and the Law, as well as the normal and everyday language of work, instruction, communication, commerce and business.”[8]

The presence of English in Canada grew out of several waves of immigration, starting with the arrival of United Empire Loyalists during and after the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783); this Loyalist base is considered to have set the basic character of Canadian English and is why, according to J.K. Chambers, “to foreigners, unless they have a good ear for subtle differences, Canadians sound American” (2010, p. 21). The second wave was made up of British and Irish immigrants who came after the War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain. Subsequent waves brought immigrants from continental Europe, including Germany, Italy, Scandinavia and Ukraine, and later, diverse populations from across Europe, Asia, Latin America and the United States (ibid., pp. 18-19). Many of these newcomers continued to speak their own languages; today, in large cities like Toronto and Vancouver, nearly half the population are native speakers of non-official languages, with Mandarin and Punjabi being Canada’s most widely spoken languages after English and French[9]. Canadian English is often perceived as homogenous across the country, though regional variation certainly exists. The most distinctive linguistic region is Newfoundland, which remained a separate British colony until it joined Canada in 1949 and whose speakers maintain distinct pronunciation and vocabulary patterns derived from southwestern English and southeastern Irish varieties of English (Boberg, 2010, p. 26). Among other areas of regional variation, Quebec English is distinct for its situation as a minority language in contact with French, and in Canada’s North (Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut), many speakers are influenced by an Indigenous substrate, whether or not they are proficient in an Indigenous language (ibid., p. 27).

Charles Boberg defines Canadian English as “the variety of English spoken by people who acquired their knowledge of English as children exclusively or mostly in Canada” (ibid., p. 25), and Standard Canadian English as “a variety whose geographic range hypothetically extends from Victoria, British Columbia, in the west to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the east, and whose social range hypothetically includes the country’s social majority, from upper working class to upper middle class” (ibid., p. 107).[10] Canadian English developed from late 18th century American varieties and is heavily influenced by the country’s geographical proximity to the United States, which allows for easy access to American media and culture and regular travel across the border for business, vacations and shopping (ibid., pp. 30-33). Yet as a former colony, partially populated through waves of immigration from Britain and Ireland, with a British influence in the political and educational systems, it also shares features with British English. In terms of spelling, pronunciation and usage, Canadian English tends to alternate between British and American forms. Certain specific features of Canadian English pronunciation have been identified, whereas in terms of grammar, linguists have noted minor differences in morphology between American and Canadian English but few consistent differences in sentence structure and syntax (ibid., p. 166).

It is in the area of vocabulary that Canadian English exhibits the most distinctiveness. While the vast majority of daily vocabulary is shared with other varieties of English, Canadian English has adopted some unique words and given specific meanings to existing words. Canadian English sometimes prefers British vocabulary items over American ones, like icing over frosting, chocolate bar over candy bar, tap over faucet, eavestrough over gutter, and pencil crayon over colored pencil. Boberg lists a number of Canadianisms and regionalisms that he identified through the North American Regional Vocabulary Survey, a study carried out with his McGill students between 1999 and 2007 (ibid., pp. 167-170). For example, the standard set of toppings on pizza—pepperoni, mushrooms and green pepper, along with tomato sauce and cheese—is known as the works in Atlantic Canada, all-dressed in Quebec (influenced by toute garnie), everything-on-it in Toronto and most of the northern United States, and supreme in the American South (ibid., pp. 171-172). The late Katherine Barber, editor-in-chief of The Canadian Oxford Dictionary, compiled a list of 1,200 regionalisms and words with meanings that are specific to Canada, grouping them into themes like geography (storm-stayed in the Maritimes and southwestern Ontario refers to being stranded by inclement weather), clothing (a bunny hug is the Saskatchewan word for a hoodie), hockey (terms used figuratively include stickhandle, deke, rag the puck and hang up one’s skates), politics (a scrum is a crowd of reporters questioning a politician), and food (everything from peameal bacon, butter tarts and jambusters—jelly doughnuts—to double-doubles for coffee with two creams, two sugars) (Barber, 2008).

2.2 From a flurry of publications... to no updates

If one of the legitimizing characteristics of a variety is “the production of a set of formal standards to be applied especially to the written form of the language, which distinguish it from other standards or varieties; in short, dictionaries and usage guides” (Boberg, 2010, p. 40), we can point to the Centennial year 1967 as the moment when Canadian English came into its own. A loose group of six men—Charles Lovell, Walter Avis, Matthew Scargill, Charles Crate, Patrick Drysdale and Douglas Leechman—formed the editorial team that produced A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DCHP-1). Combined with a set of three dictionaries for use in schools—a beginner, intermediate and senior dictionary, published in 1962, 1964 and 1967 respectively—the publication of the DCHP-1 meant that “at the end of 1967, Canadians would for the first time be proudly proclaiming that they spoke Canadian English, and there were four dictionaries to prove it” (Dollinger, 2019, p. 26). The senior dictionary was rebranded as the Gage Canadian Dictionary in 1983 and dominated the Canadian educational market for decades. Another option, the ITP Nelson Canadian Dictionary of the English Language, was published in 1997. As for the DCHP-1, a concise edition was released in 1972 and, after years of effort, a team at the University of British Columbia headed by Stefan Dollinger produced a second edition known as DCHP-2 in 2017 (Dollinger and Fee, 2017).

Despite the plethora of available options, Oxford University Press decided to enter the Canadian dictionary market in the early 1990s and hired a team of lexicographers. The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (COD) was first published in 1998, with a second edition in 2004, and according to the publisher’s blurb, quickly became a “runaway bestseller” that was adopted as “the official dictionary of The Canadian Press and The Globe and Mail.”[11] Dollinger notes that its immediate success led to “a war between publishers for market share in the compact Canadian language reference market,” which affected sales of the Gage and ITP Nelson dictionaries at an already difficult time, just when publishers were moving from using quotation slips to electronic corpus-based lexicography (2019, pp. 177-179). Indeed, despite its initial popularity, sales of the COD gradually declined and in October 2008, the team of lexicographers was laid off and the Canadian division closed.[12] Editor-in-chief Katherine Barber, who called herself “Canada’s Word Lady,” continued to champion Canadian English through her blog posts, radio spots and lectures; she died at age 61 in April 2021.[13]

With no new edition of the COD since 2004 and the only recent publication being the small paperback Collins Canadian Dictionary in 2016, language professionals, journalists, writers and students have had to rely on increasingly outdated publications or turn to free commercial websites like dictionary.com or WordReference.com, which contain fewer Canadianisms. Writing in The Globe and Mail ten years after the final edition, John Allemang asked, “Who is speaking up for Canadian English?” and noted that “[i]ts disappearance left a vacuum that has proved hard to fill” (2014, n.p.). A spokesperson for Oxford University Press noted that it “continues to track new developments in Canadian English and to update and expand coverage of Canadian vocabulary across our existing dictionary titles” (cited in Weaver, 2022, n.p.),[14] but is not planning any new offerings. Other writers have attested to the outsized role the dictionary still plays in their professional lives: Emma Skagen, managing editor of Nightwood Editions in B.C., says, “There’s this one book that rarely leaves my desk—one that I interact with nearly every day. A big, heavy hardback, the edges of its white pages spattered with the same blue that colours its cover. The date on its copyright page? 2004” (2021, p. 10). And James McCarten, editor of The Canadian Press Stylebook, notes that while the COD remains its authority for spelling, “the fact that it hasn’t been updated in quite a long time is a challenge for us—one we haven’t quite figured out how to address just yet, since there’s really no comparable replacement” (cited in Weaver, 2022, n.p.). Editors/Réviseurs Canada, a national association that promotes professional editing in the academic, publishing, not-for-profit and other sectors across the country, has been attempting since 2011 to either update an existing dictionary or create a new one. The association considers that the lack of up-to-date tools has an impact on Canadian identity: “We deserve an English-language dictionary that keeps pace with the changes in language. We deserve a dictionary that is inclusive and addresses important issues, such as reconciliation, equity and diversity.”[15]

Translators, too, consult dictionaries and other reference material regularly and make spelling and style decisions on a daily basis. And translators, too, are concerned with evolving language and issues of equity, diversity, inclusion and decolonization. Yet in the above articles and others that lament the lack of updated Canadian resources, there is no mention of how translators are adapting to the situation. It was against this backdrop, and in the face of rapidly changing translation methods that increasingly incorporate digital tools, that I carried out my study in spring 2022.

3. Methodology and Profile of Respondents

The study consisted of two phases, a survey and semi-directed interviews. For the survey, I collected data through an anonymous online questionnaire. The welcome message indicated that it was aimed specifically at language professionals who worked in English or translated towards English, and as such the questionnaire was written in English only. It was composed of 24 questions, both closed and open-ended, organized into four sections: (1) background information; (2) Canadian spelling and style; (3) French in English context; and (4) treatment of names, place names and other terms related to Indigenous Peoples. Before launching the survey, I obtained a Certificate of Ethical Acceptability for Research Involving Human Subjects from Concordia University’s Human Research Ethics Committee and tested the questionnaire on several colleagues. I then sought respondents by posting a recruitment message to my LinkedIn page and sending it by email to my professional network. The following groups shared my recruitment message to their distribution lists: Canadian Association for Translation Studies (ACT-CATS), Literary Translators Association of Canada (LTAC-ATTLC) and Ordre des traducteurs, terminologues et interprètes agréés du Québec (OTTIAQ). Between March 10 and April 23, 2022, a total of 60 surveys were completed. Given that the survey was entirely voluntary and required considerable time and thought to complete, I consider the response to be excellent.

At the end of the questionnaire, respondents were redirected to a single-question survey asking if they wished to provide an email address so that I could contact them for an interview (because it was a separate survey, I was able to maintain anonymity in the main survey). Twelve people did so and two others contacted me directly, and I ended up carrying out eleven interviews, ten by Zoom and one in writing, between April 15 and May 5, 2022. The interviews were semi-directed, following a prepared list of questions, and lasted approximately one hour. The purpose of the interviews was to delve in greater depth into the attitudes and opinions of respondents. Whereas the survey was anonymous, I knew the identity of the interview participants.

The questionnaire started with a series of background questions aimed at establishing the profile of respondents (see Table 1). As the study focused on respondents’ professional activity, I did not consider it relevant to inquire about their gender or age. Not surprisingly, given that the purpose of the study was to take stock of common practices in the translation milieu and that recruitment flowed through translation organizations, the vast majority of respondents were translators (35%) or translator/revisers (52%).[16] One respondent (2%) selected “translation coordinator or project manager” as the option that best described them, and seven (12%) selected “other,” indicating that they were a translation instructor, educator or professor; editor; copywriter; interpreter; or manager, often in addition to being a translator. Fully 92% of respondents translate from French to English, while the remaining five respondents (8%) specified that they work in French and other languages (four out of five) or Spanish and other languages (all five), specifically Arabic, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Catalan. In terms of workplace, 40% indicated that they are freelancers, 12% work at a translation agency, 17% in linguistic services in the private sector, 23% at a federal, provincial or territorial public service, and 8% selected “Other.” The respondents are highly experienced, as 65% have been in the field for over 10 years, 15% for 6-10 years, 10% for 3-5 years and 10% for less than 3 years. As for place of residence, 70% are located in Montréal, 17% elsewhere in Quebec and 13% elsewhere (3 in Toronto, 2 in Ottawa, 1 in Ontario, 1 in PEI and 1 “between N.B. and Quebec City area”).

4. Results and Discussion

4.1 Resources

Section B of the survey opened with a question on resource use. In asking which resources the respondents use on a regular basis, my intent was not to provide an exhaustive list, but to ascertain which ones relating to Canadian English they use. Nonetheless, 42 out of 60 respondents chose to provide additional information by checking “Other” and writing in responses—suggesting that resource consultation is an important aspect of their translation work. They mentioned over 30 different resources, most frequently Linguee (9 times), the Grand dictionnaire terminologique (7 times) and the Chicago Manual of Style (6 times). Of the choices provided in question B1, the most popular was Termium, selected by 53 respondents (88%), followed by The Canadian Oxford Dictionary at 45 respondents (75%), as shown in Table 2.

A follow-up question focused on the transition from paper to electronic resources and asked, “In general, what role do paper dictionaries and other print resources play in your translation practice today?” Just under half of respondents indicated that they rarely make use of them and consult online resources almost exclusively. But the other half said they do make use of print resources, sometimes often: “A lot. I have them at my feet”; “I consult mine several times a day, primarily for spelling”; “Still regularly consult the Canadian Oxford. Occasional use of the Gage for word division.” Among the reasons respondents gave for using print resources were speed (“It’s often faster to consult a paper source, especially if I already have a number of windows open.”); appreciating a break from the screen (“I enjoy incorporating this tactile element into my otherwise all computer-based work.”); cost (“I do find that when I look at purchasing a resource in paper copy, the cost is much lower.”); and completeness (“The digital COD does not adequately display italics or diacritics.”). Translators with over 10 years of experience were more likely to say that print resources continued to play a role in their work, at 56%, compared to 48% of those with less than 10 years of experience.[17]

The continued use of the print version of the COD (and The Canadian Style; see below) may reflect the fact that electronic dictionaries have certain disadvantages compared to print, such as the loss of lexical detail and the presence of advertising on free websites (Ferrett and Dollinger, 2021, p. 86). Other studies have shown that translators consult a wide range of electronic and print resources: a survey of the technological practices of literary translators in Canada found that almost all respondents made use of general paper dictionaries (82%), general electronic dictionaries (93%) and general search engines (93%), while most consulted specialized paper and electronic dictionaries, multi-domain term banks and translation search engines, among other resources (Slessor, 2020, p. 244). A Danish study of translators’ use of digital resources showed that they spent nearly 20% of the overall translating time on resource consultation, with the most popular resource being bilingual dictionaries (Hvelplund, 2017). However, a study of translators’ use of resources when post-editing a combination of pretranslated translation memory segments and machine translation output came to a different conclusion, finding that the concordance feature within the CAT tool was by far the preferred resource and only 4% of resource consultations were of online dictionaries, with print dictionaries not used at all (Bundgaard and Christensen, 2019). While further investigation is needed on translators’ resource consultation within complex translation environments that draw on translation memories and machine translation, this survey shows nonetheless that consultation of print dictionaries remains quite common among respondents.

4.2 Canadian Spelling and Style

One of the first questions asked in the interviews was “How would you define Canadian English?” Every interviewee defined it not on its own terms but in its relation to American and British English: “It’s sort of a hybrid between American and British English”; “I don’t like defining it this way, but it’s like a mix of British and American English”; “I guess it’s kind of a mishmash of American and British spellings and habits”; “Oh, a mongrel between British and American.” This characterization seems limited, as it conflates the variety as a whole with its spelling patterns. However, it is true that Canadian spelling draws on both American and British variants, sometimes in idiosyncratic ways: among other differences, it follows American usage in preferring -yze endings over -yse in words like analyze, and British usage in preferring -our endings over -or in words like colour, -re endings over -er in words like theatre, and French-based spellings over the simplified versions proposed by lexicographer Noah Webster, author of the first American dictionary, for such words as cheque, catalogue and moustache.[18] A useful table of variant spellings is provided in Editing Canadian English (Virag, 2015), a reference guide prepared for the Editors’ Association of Canada (now Editors Canada).

The Canadian Press Stylebook states, “Spelling issues bring more mail to The Canadian Press style editor than anything else. Many Canadians are passionate about spelling words ‘Canadian’” (McCarten, 2021, p. 402)—though there is some debate about what exactly that means. For translators, too, using Canadian spelling is a matter of considerable importance, according to the survey respondents: fully 100% said they use it “all of the time” (52%), “most of the time” (40%) or “sometimes” (8%), with no respondents selecting “rarely” or “never.” In response to the open-ended question “On what basis do you decide whether or not to use Canadian spelling?” many referred to intended audience, client preference or in-house style as factors influencing their decision, and gave reasons such as “I work in Canada. I translate Canadian texts. And my employer expects it,” and “I represent a government organization and believe it is important to model Canadian spelling for the general population.” In addition, a majority of respondents indicated in question B4 that they choose “English (Canada)” or EN-CA as their language preference on an operating system (65%) or word processor (83%) or as the target language in CAT tools (53%), rather than using whatever is checked by default (3%). These figures are significant given that some platforms do not recognize Canadian English as a variety—for example, Gmail offers only English (UK) and English (US) as options—and on technologies like Android smartphones and Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa, it must be selected manually.[19]

It is essential for translators working in any language variety to respect editorial style, the set of guidelines that writers follow to ensure clarity and consistency in such matters as punctuation, hyphenation, capitalization and abbreviations. The majority of respondents rely on specialized resources to make editorial style decisions: 68% use a published style guide, 63% an in-house style guide, 62% a client-specific or project-specific style sheet, and 58% their own style notes or documents. One of the main resources for Canadian style is Writing Tips Plus, a keyword search-based online-only tool created in 2020 that is available on the Language Portal of Canada website. It combines the former tools Writing Tips, Linguistic Recommendations and Reminders, and The Canadian Style. The latter was developed by the Translation Bureau and first published in print in 1987, then revised and expanded in 1997. However, only 24 survey respondents (40%) said they used Writing Tips Plus on a regular basis. Another eight respondents mentioned The Canadian Style, four of whom specifically said they consulted the paper version (“After many years of using print dictionaries, I’m very fast at whipping open my copies of The Canadian Oxford, The Canadian Style and Oxford Collocations, and have inserted notes and tabs in some places that are still useful.”) One person interviewed, who manages the English team at a translation agency, felt that the content of Writing Tips Plus was valuable but using the tool was tedious, as it is structured in a counter-intuitive way that makes it hard to find the correct information. These findings suggest that translators have not fully adopted Writing Tips Plus and the transition from The Canadian Style is still underway.

To ascertain whether or not respondents followed the recommendations of Writing Tips Plus, I did not pose questions directly, but provided four options and asked which was closest to the way they would write the sentence, while noting that there was no right or wrong answer. Table 3 shows several style variations: B9A has the comma and period outside double quotation marks, which is not recommended but commonly seen on websites; B9B follows the Writing Tips Plus recommendations for both quotation marks and unspaced em dashes; B9C follows the recommendation for quotation marks and the alternate style with a spaced en dash; and B9D combines several styles.[20] Most respondents (44 or 73%) selected the option that does indeed follow the recommended style. Ultimately, while some respondents had their own style preferences, many noted that it was important to adapt their translations to the stylistic preferences of their clients.

4.3. French in English Context

French-to-English translators working in Canada know that they must continually make decisions about how to treat certain French words and phrases: whether or not they should be translated, whether to follow official rules or client preference in cases where they diverge, to what extent readers may be expected to understand French, whether diacritics should be retained, whether italics or quotation marks should be used, what capitalization style should be followed, etc. The question of how to deal with French in an English context is so complex that Editing Canadian English devotes an entire chapter to it (Virag, 2015). The Charter of the French Language, which is commonly referred to as Bill 101 and was reformed in June 2022 through Bill 96, states, among many other sections, that “The Government, the government departments, the other agencies of the civil administration and the services thereof shall be designated by their French names alone.”[21] This means that for names like Ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec and Héma-Québec, there is no official translation. Do Anglophone readers understand what is being referred to; should a description be added out of consideration for the audience? Is the definite article part of the name? For street names, public places and geographical features, should the French generic be translated? Should titles of publications be translated and if so, italicized? And should Céline Dion be spelled with an accent?

Section C of the survey contained three closed questions with four options, of which respondents were asked to select the one closest to the way they would write or translate the sentence, and one mandatory open-ended question that asked, “For the previous three questions, can you elaborate on your reasoning? What guidelines do you follow in making your decisions?” One question focused on the thorny issue of how to spell Montreal/Montréal and Quebec/Québec, the city and province. Writing Tips Plus follows the Geographical Names Board of Canada in recommending the use of the official name of municipalities without translation (Montréal, Québec) and the official English name of the province (Quebec).[22] By contrast, the Commission de toponymie du Québec states that the province should be written with an acute accent (Québec).[23] These conflicting recommendations were reflected in the respondents’ choices, which were more evenly spread than for other questions. Table 4 shows that only 9 respondents (15%) followed the federal government recommendation (Quebec government, Montréal, capital-C on “City” as it refers to the municipal administration), 18 respondents (30%) followed the Quebec government recommendation and 28 respondents (47%) followed the common but unofficial style without accents.

In answer to question C5, which asked them to elaborate on their reasoning, some respondents said they followed in-house style or The Canadian Style, while others mentioned the need for consistency or consideration for the target audience. Here is a sample of partial responses:

“Readability is paramount for me and I always think about my audience when translating.”
“Use English whenever you can—no accents. With French proper nouns, make sure they are understandable by non-French speakers.”
“Many Quebec clients prefer that I keep the accents and I’m happy to do so.”
“In English, there is no e-acute in ‘Montreal’ and ‘Quebec.’ This is a huge pet peeve of mine.”
“It really depends on the client and the context. But generally speaking, I was taught to ‘avoid spoonfeeding the reader’ and that’s usually how I do things.”

One interviewee, who is part of a linguistic services team in the private sector, noted that clients often feel strongly one way or another: “I literally started a chart—it’s called the accent-no accent table […]. It’s very clear, you can consult it, you can see, do they want Montréal with an accent or do they not.”

Another issue that comes up often in French-to-English translation concerns the presence of French borrowings and loanwords: as Anglophones in Quebec are exposed to French in the workplace and the media, many terms related to institutions and policies as well as local customs have been assimilated into English. These include direct borrowings like dépanneur [convenience store] and métro [subway]; acronyms and initialisms derived from French designations like CEGEP (collège d’enseignement général et professionnel [a pre-university college system] and CLSC (centre local de services communautaires [community health centre]), and semantic extensions like animator for a workshop facilitator or moderator and professor for secondary school or college teachers (Grant, 2010, pp. 183-187; Fee and McAlpine, 1997, pp. 404-405; Fee, 2008).

More recently, a number of terms related to the COVID-19 pandemic were relayed to the public through French-language government press conferences and occasionally made their way in anglicized form into English media outlets: examples include déconfinement [lockdown lifting, sometimes written “deconfinement”] and délestage [hospital offloading, sometimes “delestage”].[24] Nonetheless, in response to question C3 (see Table 5), a strong majority (70%) selected the sentence containing only English terms: “The opposition parties are pressing the government to adopt a plan to lift restrictions and avoid further offloading in the hospitals.” Some respondents elaborated on their reasoning, with one person stating, regarding délestage, that “it is probably worth including it in parentheses for informational purposes. This is based on the assumption that the reader will likely be having some contact with Francophone media, and therefore taking the opportunity to provide helpful information.” While many of the respondents stated a preference for avoiding gallicisms wherever possible, one interviewee, a translator at a Quebec labour union, made an interesting argument in favour of what some would consider a gallicism: “Let’s say you have an Annual General Meeting […]. We call it an Annual General Assembly, which doesn’t exist in English, normally you’d say it’s the AGM […] but it’s actually easier for them, the members, because it’s always called AGA in French—so in a way, a less good translation might be more appropriate for our members in certain situations.”

Overall, client preference and a concern for readability figured prominently in respondents’ comments, along with a recognition that translators need to use judgment and take responsibility for making their own decisions based on reliable sources and an awareness of usage.

4.4. Treatment of Indigenous Terms, Peoples and Place Names

As relationships between Canadian institutions and Indigenous Peoples have evolved, so too has the terminology used to describe them: whereas historically, names of peoples and place names were often coined by European settlers based on anglicized forms of words heard in Indigenous languages, the original names are gradually being re-established by Indigenous Peoples themselves. As Gregory Younging writes in Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples,

Indigenous Peoples add their voices to the argument that it is important for any national or cultural group to have input into the documentation of its history, philosophies, and reality as a basic matter of cultural integrity. In some respects, this is especially pressing for Indigenous Peoples in Canada and other parts of the world, because they have been misrepresented for so long, which has created a body of literature inconsistent with, and often opposed to, Indigenous cultural understandings.
2018, p. 2; italics in original

In Canada, the term Indigenous Peoples (with an uppercase I and either an upper or a lowercase P) is now considered preferable to Aboriginal peoples—used in the Canadian Constitution of 1982—as the collective name for First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples in Canada. The term draws on international movements and usage like the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The evolving terminology is reflected in the name of the federal government department, which was called Indian Affairs and Northern Development from 1966 to 2011, Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development from 2011 to 2015, and Indigenous and Northern Affairs from 2015 to 2017, after which it was dissolved and replaced by two departments: Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs, and Indigenous Services.

It should be noted that the current terminology is somewhat different from that used in the United States, where certain terms considered outdated in Canada remain common: American Indian and Native American are acceptable, along with Alaska Native to refer to the first peoples of Alaska.[25] Tribe and tribal are common in the US, but considered problematic in Canada (Younging, 2018, p. 60). The term reservation is only used in the US; reserve is acceptable in Canada to refer to a tract of land held in trust by the Crown but community is preferable to refer to the First Nation living there. Due to these differences and others, translators working in Canada would do well to ensure they consult Canadian, not American, reference material and resources on these subjects. Examples of such resources include the above-mentioned Elements of Indigenous Style, the Journalists for Human Rights publication Style Guide for Reporting on Indigenous People (Carpenter, 2017), and the University of British Columbia’s Indigenous Peoples: Language Guidelines (2021).

All the above sources point out that in many cases, it is more appropriate to refer to the group in question, whether Inuit, Métis or a specific First Nation, rather than to Indigenous Peoples collectively. Many First Nations are engaged in a process of re-establishing the traditional names used to identify themselves and correcting the spelling so that it reflects the original language (which sometimes means that special fonts must be acquired, such as Typotheque’s Unified Canadian Syllabics fonts[26]). Similarly, the Geographical Names Board of Canada is collaborating with Indigenous groups to restore traditional place names and give names in Indigenous languages to certain unnamed geographical features and places. Hundreds of names are thus updated each year, such as Dettah, a Yellowknives Dene First Nation community in the Northwest Territories, which had been misspelled for decades and was finally given the correct spelling in 2019.[27]

The final section of the survey considered Indigenous terminology in the Canadian context. Table 6 shows question D3, which asked respondents to select the translation closest to the way they would translate the sentence provided.

Most respondents (48%) selected the fourth option, which provided both the restored name, Kanien’kéhaka, and the name given by settlers, Mohawk, even though the French original only used Mohawk. In response to open-ended question D4, which asked respondents to elaborate on their decision-making process, the following comment, in favour of the fourth option, was typical: “I think it’s important to use the preferred name of the First Nation, but believe we are in a transition period that may require us to insert the more commonly used name to help the reader.” Respondents who preferred the first or second option, which used only Mohawk, gave one of two reasons: either they checked Tracey Deer’s website and saw that she herself uses the word Mohawk, so they logically followed that word choice, or they felt they should stick closely to the French original (“My gut reaction, without knowing the client or the target audience, would be not to ‘correct’ the French writer’s work.”)

The range of responses and thoughtful comments by the survey respondents demonstrates the complexity of the translation decision-making process. The survey ended with a non-mandatory open-ended question, “In your opinion, what would it mean to work towards the decolonization of Canadian English?” It was an admittedly broad question that several respondents felt they did not have the ability to answer or had not thought about before. Nonetheless, here is a sample of partial responses:

“I’m not sure that is possible, given that English is likely to always be perceived as a colonizing language around the world.”
“As translators, we can do our part in our own work and also point out to our clients opportunities to make changes in French texts as well.”
“Since this is an ongoing process, for the time being it means doing the due diligence to get things right in a particular context, even when there isn’t an official published recommendation available yet, and staying up to date on linguistic discussions in Indigenous communities.”
“It is part of a larger process of the country concretely recognizing its actions in history, coming to terms with them and taking steps to make amends, including in how language is used.”
“How long do you have…? […] Teach the actual history of colonization. Teach actual Indigenous history and practices. Work with communities to restore or link place names where desired. […]”
“From the perspective of language use in written communications, decolonizing Canadian English would mean adopting the preferred use of terminology and spelling of equity-deserving groups in the texts I produce for publication.”

In the Canadian English context, decolonization would no doubt also involve challenging the assumptions of Western thought that are embedded in language; Meighan (2021) gives the example of considering oil as an uncountable noun, thus without limit, or defining water as “tasteless” and “odourless” rather than life-giving, and he urges the adoption of Indigenous and earth-centred worldviews.

Conclusion

This study on common practices in the Quebec translation milieu in regard to Canadian English gathered pertinent information and showed the professionalism and initiative of the respondents. Among the key findings is that reliance on dictionaries is in a period of transition, with many respondents continuing to consult paper dictionaries, including The Canadian Oxford Dictionary. However, respondents note that they’ve had to turn to other sources and methods like Google searches, Antidote statistics and checking federal government websites to compensate for the lack of updates and take into account evolving language and new terminology. In addition, a majority of respondents consult published or in-house style guides, client-specific or project-specific style sheets, and editorial style notes; this type of document is likely to become increasingly relevant for questions of usage and editorial style. Resource consultation is a central task in the translation process, and further research is needed on the impact of translation technologies in this area.

A second finding concerns the importance of Canadian spelling, with all respondents using it at least some of the time. Several interviewees stated that Canadian spelling mattered to them as a point of identity—for example, one person remarked that if “color” was suggested by predictive text on a mobile device, they would take the time to write over it with “colour.” More broadly, Canadian spelling was seen as a visible acknowledgement of language variation and a reflection of translators’ background and heritage. “We exist,” said one interviewee, a translator/reviser at the Translation Bureau, “and we do have some distinct features to our language and to our culture, and of course language is a reflection of culture, too, that’s why it’s important.”

Lastly, it is clear from both the survey and the interviews that paying attention to Canadian English is part of translators’ responsibility to keep up with language change; as one respondent put it, “as our sociological understanding(s) evolve, so must our language.” Whether it be maintaining the names of Quebec institutions in French, researching the correct names of Indigenous communities or respecting regional differences, these actions are part of a commitment to equity, diversity, inclusion and decolonization. Several interviewees said they felt a duty to educate themselves and build awareness among their peers and had, for example, recently attended workshops on diversity, gender-inclusive language or accessibility. Others noted that the impetus sometimes came from clients: in sectors as diverse as mining and tourism, building good relations with Indigenous communities is a key objective, and for clients who do a lot of consultation with these communities and seek to build consensus, it is critical to use the right language. One interviewee, who has studied numerous languages, pointed to particularities stemming from the influence of immigrant languages on the English spoken in Canada. And respondents appreciate their language environment: “I would hate to see a homogenization,” said one interviewee, “I would rather not see it flattened out.” Acknowledging the specificity of Canadian English as a settler colonial variety influenced to various degrees by French, Indigenous languages, and newcomer languages means recognizing the richness and creativity that stems from linguistic diversity.

Common Practices in the Quebec Translation Milieu with Respect to Canadian English Usage

Abstract

Résumé

Introduction

1. The World Englishes Paradigm