Skate Canada's French

Apologies in advance, this isn't going to be a very constructive thread.

Skate Canada handles French like a school requirement they can't be bothered to do properly, in a completely backhanded way.

The guy announcer from ACI was a pain to understand and seemed to be reading a phonetical script. He is only the last in a long line of announcers completely struggling without seemingly doing any effort. Even PJ Kwong, who is one of the best anglo Canadians is still hard to listen to because she noticeably struggles.

But the most insulting has to be their official tweets. In every single one I read I can pinpoint an obvious mistake no fluent speaker would make, as if they use Google Translate or can't be bothered.

Figure skating is obviously mainly anglo, but i see many Quebec surnames still in the skaters (like Alicia Pineault, the only Canadian lady at ACI), so it's not like the discipline is completely dead in Quebec.

Honestly, if it's going to be like that, just drop the French and do everything in English, we all understand it. Judging by Twitter comments I'm not the only one who thinks this.

I am not francophone, and I am not Canadian, but I used to be near fluent in French many moons ago and still I think have some proficiency. So I understand what you mean about the “bad” accents.

Canada, and Québec, have laws regarding official bilingualism. Although not applicable to this enterprise, Anglophone Canadians (at least 25 years ago when I knew about this, perhaps a francophone Canadian like our friend @4everChan could weigh in about now) would be given an “E for effort” no matter how bad the French. And I can’t imagine a mindset in Québec accepting “oh well everyone speaks English”. Oh non non non....

But then again accents, mangling names, etc. really doesn’t bother me (I’d be happy to announce if they flew me up there gave me tickets and taught me to identify jumps) so maybe I’m not the best one to comment....

Yes i used to study french at school like more than 10 years ago, and i also noticed that the guy announcer has a terrible french, the other announcer was much better but then she botched the names of the skaters.

Oh, I thought his French was pretty cute.

It should be ok in SCI cause it’s in Laval, but yeahh it was pretty horrendous.

TerpsichoreFS said:

Apologies in advance, this isn't going to be a very constructive thread.

Skate Canada handles French like a school requirement they can't be bothered to do properly, in a completely backhanded way. ...

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I think you are referring to the in-arena announcer?

Meanwhile, I think Skate Canada deserves credit for its Autumn Classic live-stream commentary in French from Quebec's Myriane Samson, a former ladies' competitor.

first of all,

laws about French are different in every province... and the fact that they made the effort to announce in French is a BIG WOW...
we are talking about oakville here... it's not a locality with many Francophones...

if they didn't bother announcing in "broken" French, people would complain much more, because you can watch the stream in either language...

actually, I received it as a great courtesy being a native speaker.

Names mangled etc? Give me a break... they are mangled in every single event... Gibson was just pronounced Jibson at Nepela...and that's only one word.

What is interesting, as mentioned, if you are a French speaker, you have the option thanks to Skate Canada to watch the daily motion live stream in either official language... I think it's Ted Barton and Debbi Wilkes in English and Myriam Samson in French... i think that's very classy and I don't know of many challenger events doing such a thing... it's a great form of respect no matter the outcome.

Not to open a can of worms but it's not like the announcer at IDF are perfectly fluent in every spoken language... and to link this to a potential death of figure skating in Quebec??? are you serious? The sport has never been as popular in Quebec as now.... Virtue and Moir, as well as Duhamel and Radford were both representing Quebec at Nationals and then, at the Olympics within the Canadian team, and were acclaimed as national heroes at Stars on Ice.

Let's see how IDF handles English or any foreign names...

The worst, and I mean *worst* mangling of any names in skating I ever heard was French television (don't remember the channel, Sport2?) trying to pronounce Alexa Scimeca Knierim at 2017 Worlds.

Hey, it's not an easy name to pronounce. As an Anglophone, I took no offense and didn't care.

No biggie

4everchan said:

first of all,

laws about French are different in every province... and the fact that they made the effort to announce in French is a BIG WOW...
we are talking about oakville here... it's not a locality with many Francophones...

if they didn't bother announcing in "broken" French, people would complain much more, because you can watch the stream in either language...

actually, I received it as a great courtesy being a native speaker.

Names mangled etc? Give me a break... they are mangled in every single event... Gibson was just pronounced Jibson at Nepela...and that's only one word.

What is interesting, as mentioned, if you are a French speaker, you have the option thanks to Skate Canada to watch the daily motion live stream in either official language... I think it's Ted Barton and Debbi Wilkes in English and Myriam Samson in French... i think that's very classy and I don't know of many challenger events doing such a thing... it's a great form of respect no matter the outcome.

Not to open a can of worms but it's not like the announcer at IDF are perfectly fluent in every spoken language... and to link this to a potential death of figure skating in Quebec??? are you serious? The sport has never been as popular in Quebec as now.... Virtue and Moir, as well as Duhamel and Radford were both representing Quebec at Nationals and then, at the Olympics within the Canadian team, and were acclaimed as national heroes at Stars on Ice.

Let's see how IDF handles English or any foreign names...

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I thought it was a legal requirement to announce in French? Isn't it?

TryMeLater said:

I thought it was a legal requirement to announce in French? Isn't it?

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You know.. you may be right.. it all depends on what kind of event, and its funding, and i believe this, as an international event hosted by Skate Canada which would be federally funded requires it... but it's not 100% clear to me with what I find online.

HOWEVER : my point about languages in provinces is that French is NOT mandatory everywhere at all times, people do NOT speak it throughout the country at all, and for a place like Oakville, to do a decent job of it, the lady I just watched was not that bad... she spoke like SIRI so... for a place like Oakville, to meet the requirements in a decent manner is sufficient to me, as it's quite unusual for such a community... I lived in BC for 12 years and heard very little French at sporting events... Just the major ones.

TryMeLater said:

I thought it was a legal requirement to announce in French? Isn't it?

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Government services (at least federal govt services) have to be available in both official languages in Canada. Is the announcing at a Skate-Canada sponsored figure skating event a government service? I kind of doubt it.

Skate Canada did have an excellent stream of the event in French.

And they did replace the announcer with one more fluent in French.

I've heard terrible announcing in English at some international skating events, but I didn't make a big deal of it. I was just happy when a better announcer was swapped in.

4everchan said:

Names mangled etc? Give me a break... they are mangled in every single event... Gibson was just pronounced Jibson at Nepela...and that's only one word.

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A bit OTT, but name mangling seems to me to be almost integral to the sport - just ask Yuzuru (I love how one of the British uncles way back in 2011 said "a new name to me, Yuzuri Hanyu, but I won't forget it..." didn't even get it right then... and then spend the next half-decade twisting it into nomencaltural preztels, as did quite a few others)

TryMeLater said:

I thought it was a legal requirement to announce in French? Isn't it?

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But not, I presume, to do it to some sort of set-in-statute standard of excellence. It would be nice... but goodness knows, enough native speakers of languages muck them up (Henry Higgins was dead to rights about English, and still is)

I actually thought the in-arena female announcer was very good, especially considering the event wasn't held in a Francophone area of Canada. The male in-arena announcers certainly had appreciably less well-pronounced French, and I spent a good portion of the competition uncertain of whether I wanted to laugh or bash my head against the wall.

That all said - for the criticism that this was a major international event and that they should have gotten "better" people: you have to remember that figure skating is still a relatively small sport, and though this was an international event, it wasn't a GP or anything like that. At different points in the program, Debbie and Ted's microphones were cutting out, the K&C camera was down (from too many Yuzuru fans in the arena with wireless devices :hopelessness, and the on-screen scoring didn't work. Ted went and personally manned the cameras during practices.

But overall, the stream was great quality, never really cut out (at least while I was watching it), and was available legally worldwide. It was clear that they were making an effort to do as much as they could, and maybe they bit off a little more than they could chew, but it's at least nice that they tried.

I did my fair amount of harping on the bad French announcers myself, but in the end, it was nice that they at least made the effort. As someone who speaks several languages (some much less well than others!), the most important part of speaking a language, as a non-native speaker, is that your intended audience can at least understand your meaning. The French pronunciation may have been pretty off, but it was all understandable, at least to me (with some exceptions of things like when deuxième and douzième became indistinguishable from one another ), and that's the most important part.

Also, let's remember the English pronunciation of some of the announcers in non-English countries. But usually we can understand what they're saying enough to understand scores, placements, and who is skating next - which is way better than if we had to keep guessing while they spoke a language we didn't understand.

I live in the hub and poster child for bilingualism in Canada. Not everyone here speaks french. Everything has to be in both official languages. My belief is that because Skate Canada gets government support that they have to offer services in both languages. Also many of our top skaters are Francophone. Skate Canada would be doing them a disservice not to recognize both offical languages. Joanne Rochette and Marie-France and Patrice deserved to have their names announced in their language of birth when they competed in Canada.

The fact that the french population in Oakville is tiny wouldn't change that fact. Most French people here are actually ridiculous tolerant of English Canadians making an attempt at French so my guess is while it might cause them to wince a little at the accent they are generally just happy that they weren't excluded as they were for many years.

NanaPat said:

Government services (at least federal govt services) have to be available in both official languages in Canada. Is the announcing at a Skate-Canada sponsored figure skating event a government service? I kind of doubt it.

Skate Canada did have an excellent stream of the event in French.

And they did replace the announcer with one more fluent in French.

I've heard terrible announcing in English at some international skating events, but I didn't make a big deal of it. I was just happy when a better announcer was swapped in.

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I don't usually mind bad pronunciation and I get that the announcers aren't usually fluent in a language other than their mother tongue.
However, even I, who don't know single word of French, know that it's etas-uni and not eta-t-unit.

TryMeLater said:

I don't usually mind bad pronunciation and I get that the announcers aren't usually fluent in a language other than their mother tongue.
However, even I, who don't know single word of French, know that it's etas-uni and not eta-t-unit.

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Echoing 4everchan, Francophones in Canada would have been watching the French stream with French commentary. And it was also available worldwide from Skate Canada's website.

The live arena announcer was pretty painful it's true...but he also seemed to be a standard southern Ontario announcer with a 'radio' voice. He likely does hockey games and such.

Guys like that are paired with a francophone announcer for big federal events in Canada. Because what makes those announcers so easily intelligible in one language rarely has them speaking crisply enough in the other. But for an arena event, it doesn't work.

But it's good for Skate Canada to get feedback, so that they can think about who to engage or future events.

Not a native English/French speaker, but I completed the DELF B2. While I did wince at the pronunciation, I still could catch the meaning and the intended message, so it wasn't a big deal to me.

Unless it's a large-scale event, mispronouncing names and such are okay-ish to me. I remember a French announcer mispronouncing Yuzuru's name as Yuzuru Anyu too. Understandable because French H is silent. But it's okay, English speakers are going to make mistakes speaking in French, so do French speakers with other languages.

Just my personal opinion though, it was a Challenger event.

French Canadian native speaker here! The announcer's pronunciation was...pretty atrocious, BUT, as many other posters have said, it was still possible to understand what was going on, and I hugely appreciate the effort. Skater's names being mispronounced and smaller events like this is pretty much a given, but the effort to have the announcements be bilingual was lovely.

I think it was a matter of not finding the right announcer in time. I also noticed the attrocious french by the announcer. Most french canadians are able to speak english fluently but the reverse is often untrue. I often wish French was manditory in Canadian high schools. Even then though we were taught paris french instead of quebecois french. I much prefer the quebecois french.

NymphyNymphy said:

I think it was a matter of not finding the right announcer in time. I also noticed the attrocious french by the announcer. Most french canadians are able to speak english fluently but the reverse is often untrue. I often wish French was manditory in Canadian high schools. Even then though we were taught paris french instead of quebecois french. I much prefer the quebecois french.

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Uhm, bilingual (English - French) person here. (But I have other languages too. )

Let's not get into a whose fluency in the other official language is worse debate please.

There are definitely unilingual francophones in Quebec, and those who speak English as well as that announcer spoke French.

The point is that people are trying to be bilingual and make their best efforts to deliver services and communicate in more than one language. How great is that?!

BTW I like both European and Quebecois French, and got both along the way in school. Not wishing a debate on that either, but would say that at least one of the announcers (female) sounded like a native francophone, whether or not her French is different from that which the author of the OP is familiar with.