Who Cares?

When I heard about the mistakes in the French text on the Vimy Ridge Memorial, my first reaction was not anger but mild annoyance. Were French spelling mistakes on national monuments a rare occurrence, I would no doubt have been extremely angry, but it happens so often that it was simply another news item on the Globe’s front page. After all, it wouldn’t have been the first time: a few days before the new War Museum’s official opening ceremony, syntax errors were discovered in the windows which were supposed to spell “n’oublions jamais” in Morse code.

This is a bad sign.

Basically, a francophone such as myself is so used to the government making spelling mistakes all over the map that he’s only mildly annoyed when some are discovered on the Vimy Ridge Memorial.

But now, after giving some though to the matter, I’m angry. I’m angry because the mistakes have been there for twenty years and have no doubt been signalled to the government, yet they had to wait until a Radio-Canada reporter made the story national news before acting. In other words, they knew about the situation, but were so cynical and unconcerned that they waited until the news made the front page before fixing things.

When a government is so indifferent about one of our official languages that it puts Anglophone volunteers in charge of translating and reviewing texts into French, and waits twenty years before fixing the mistakes, something is wrong.