Montreal Métro Passengers Lost With No Translation

A bewildered American tourist who vacationed in Montreal this summer recently wrote a letter to the Gazette, the local anglophone daily, wondering why announcements on the métro are delivered only in French.

The newspaper's response and the quotes it extracted from various officials highlighted an interesting contrast in policies between Montreal and Paris public transportation services. While in Paris, announcements are routinely delivered in three languages (French, English and a rotating third major language), Montreal metro will only play a pre-recorded bilingual tape in an emergency situation ("fire! get out!"). "Routine" messages such as announcements of delays are delivered only in French as a matter of policy.

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Photo: Max T-M The Gazette, in responding to the reader's question, quotes Martin Bergeron, a spokesperson for the Office québécoise de la langue française as saying "Only messages about emergencies can also be in languages other than French".

It's an interesting policy. While I am generally supportive of efforts to promote the use of French in Montreal, and conscious of the various far-reaching implications of the (in)famous Bill 101, guaranteeing the supremacy of the French language in Quebec, I am wondering if this is going too far.

Montreal, not without some merit, casts itself as a major North American tourism destination. It is visited by close to a million foreign tourists per year and many more out-of-province Canadians. The city's dependency on foreign visitors is only going to get more acute in the wake of the recent Formula One cancellation.

While French and other francophone tourists are an important part of the market, clearly the majority of visitors do not understand French, much less the garbled metro speaker voice dialect. Right now, the two largest groups of foreign tourists are Mexicans and Americans.

How idealistic would it be to hope that the city does something to help these groups (not to mention countless out-of-province Canadians) feel welcome on public transportation? If bilingual messages are such a politically charged issue, how about pre-recording trilingual ones (French/English/Spanish), at least for the most popular situations, i.e. service delays?