"Why do you say 'check-up'? You should use the proper French term: 'examen général.'"
"But it takes too long -- 'Ex-am-en gé-né-ral.' . . . 'Check-up' is much quicker!"
Posted on 11/22/2004 10:29:57 PM PST by ijcr
French employees will accuse a US multinational in court today of discrimination, claiming that they are being forced to speak English.
They say General Electric Medical Systems is sidelining the large proportion of its workforce who speak little or no English. It encourages them to work with company documents and instruction manuals written in English.
"The company has an American ideology which has been accepted by a lot of the French managers, who think it is chic and looks good to speak English, even to their French colleagues," Jocelyne Chabart, a secretary, said yesterday.
Emails are often sent in English, even if the recipient and the sender are French, and meetings chaired and attended exclusively by French staff are at times conducted in English, she said.
"We think that employees should have the right to understand the instructions they're given and to follow what is being said in meetings."
The staff say it is not a question of national pride, but of discrimination. They claim that people have been denied promotion because they speak poor English, and that those who protest are accused of rejecting the company's ethos.
There is a safety issue involved, they add, because the company makes medical x-ray equipment. "If the technician putting the equipment together doesn't understand the instruction manual, which is in English, the results could be very dangerous," Ms Chabart said.
The staff had seen a gradual shift to English in almost all the company documents since 1998. Orders for parts made by French suppliers were often sent in English, causing enormous problems when the suppliers could not understand them.
Lawyers for the union CGT will argue that the company is in breach of the 1994 Toubon law, which says that all documents vital to an employee being able to work effectively must be in French. If the work ers succeed, it will create a legal precedent which will force many other US companies in France to change their practices.
The case is backed by dozens of organisations which campaign against creeping Anglicisation of French business, among them the Académie française, which won an official ban last year on "email", favouring the neologism courriel.
Ms Chabart said: "I was employed as a trilingual secretary and so my English is very good. But a lot of the time I don't understand business American."
A GE spokeswoman said employees were provided with translations of all "business critical communications", adding: "GE believes it is meeting all local language requirements."
The mission of the académiciens is to protect the French language from the threat posed by English, or rather American English. New words appear in the French dictionary by their consent only.
This stifles innovation and thought.By the time the people have used a new technology or concept for two years, the Academy will meet and then give it a French name.
I wonder what the Napoleanic Codes have to say about this...
Actually lately they have just borrowed words that Quebecers have developped,certainly "courriel" is an example of a word borrowed from the North American cousins.
this is a parody right? i mean the french cant be that stupid can they?
I once attended a senior staff meeting of an Israeli company in Tel Aviv whose CEO was a German (appointed by the lead investor Deutsche Bank). When the Israeli staff complained about the meetings not being in Hebrew, the German CEO stated: "When Israel wins two World Wars we will have themmetings in Hebrew, but for now we will have them in English." The same advice applies doubly for France.
Thank you for the stock tip to purchase more GE stock.
"We don't even have a language, just this stupid accent"
(M. Defarge, History of the World, via Mel Brooks)
In H*ll, if at all possible.
Is this a case of outsourcing gone bad? IF so, I hope this sends a message to other American companies who want to outsource.
Now there's a German with perspective!
Isn't anti-english a hate crime under EU law?
"But it takes too long -- 'Ex-am-en gé-né-ral.' . . . 'Check-up' is much quicker!"
And the _Guardian_ is writing an amicus brief.
The EU’s translation service, located in Brussels and Luxembourg, is the largest in the world – with a permanent staff of 1,300 linguists and 500 support staff.
The EU translation budget is expected to rise to 880m euros. About $1 Billion...
The figure include the cost of translating thousands of pages of official documents into EU languages and interpretation costs will rise from €105m in 2003 to €140m per year after enlargement of the Union.
English is the language spoken by most officials in the EU since the last enlargement.
Pardon my 'french'.
Snark!
"We-a-a-a-a-a-a-ux"?
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