Bridging the Digital Divide: Official Languages on the Internet
HIGHLIGHTS
USE OF THE INTERNET
- Recent data1 on the percentage of households connected to the Internet show that Quebec, at 45%, is behind Canada as a whole, at 55%. The only provinces with a lower rate are New Brunswick (43%) and Newfoundland and Labrador (44%).
- In 2001, 37% of Quebeckers went to English sites first; by 2005 this had dropped to 25%. There is still a significant difference in Internet use between Francophones and non-Francophones in Quebec. In 2000, there was a difference of 11 percentage points (38% of Francophones compared with 49% of non-Francophones); in 2004 there was still a difference of 10 percentage points (57% of Francophones compared with 67% of non-Francophones).2
FRENCH CONTENT ON THE INTERNET
- In 2000, nearly all young Anglophone Internet users thought there was sufficient English content, but only 59% of young Francophone users thought there was sufficient French content.3
- In August 2004, French content represented only 5% of all content on the Web, as compared to 58% for English content.4 In September 2004, only 4% of all Internet users worldwide were Francophones.5
- French is in third place in terms of Internet content, after English and German (a language that is spoken by fewer people than French).
FRENCH ON THE INTERNET AND GOVERNMENT
- The budget for the Canadian Heritage program Canadian Culture Online has doubled, from about $35 million to $70 million a year. With the assistance of Canadian Heritage, 928 projects were carried out between 2000 and 2002, of which 55% (510) concerned the digitization of existing French or bilingual content or the creation of original French or bilingual digital content.
- Launched in 2003, the Culture.ca site helps people find Canadian cultural content in French on the Internet. The site has 200,000 visitors every month. Visitors can find links to about 12,000 quality Canadian culture sites. Of these, 30% are links to cultural content in French.
- Industry Canada set up a Language Industry Program in 2003. The program will last a maximum of five years and has a budget of $10 million to support the language industry. The money will be used for networking and co-ordination, and for marketing and branding activities.
- The National Research Council has established a Language Technologies Research Centre.6 The LTRC currently has about two dozen researchers associated with it. Its mission is to carry out and promote research and development activities in language technologies to benefit the Canadian language industry.7
- The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), acting on a recommendation, took a variety of measures such as pursuing FrancoNet (which had a budget of $4.5 million for 1999–2004) and granting $4 million for the second phase of the African Virtual University, a distance education project that has resulted in the creation of a virtual library containing 1,000 journals.
- The Government of Canada is one of the largest producers of written material in Canada and the world (14,300,000 pages). The appearance of the Web and the establishment of Government On-Line have led to a 15% increase since 1996 in the amount of content to be translated.
FRENCH ON EMBASSY INTERNET SITES
- French now has equal status on the Internet sites of 8 out of 40 sampled embassies (China, Belgium, Finland, Colombia, United States, Norway, Spain and France). The sites of another 13 foreign missions have a certain amount of French. This represents real progress, given the importance of some of these embassies, notably those of the United States and China. However French and English continue to have unequal status at most of the 137 foreign missions in Canada.
1 Statistics Canada (2003)
2 CEFRIO (2005), NetTendances — Sondage sur l’utilisation des TI par la population adulte au Québec.
3 Rotherman, Michelle. “Wired Young Canadians”. Statistics Canada. Canadian Social Trends. Winter 2001.
4 See Aguillo, Isidro et al. (2004), Regional and Linguistic Patterns in Positioning, Madrid, Centro de Información y Documentatión Científica, consulted on February 6, 2005 at http://www.csi.ensmp.fr/WebCSI/4S/download_paper/download_paper.php?paper=aguillo_garcia_arroyo.pdf. According to estimates made by the authors, using Yahoo! and Google, German is used slightly more on the Web than French, at 7% of all content. Japanese is neck and neck with French at 5%. Next come Spanish (3%), Chinese (3%), Russian (3%), Italian (3%), Dutch (2%), Portuguese (2%) and Korean (2%). If these figures are compared to those collected by Alis after INET 1996, French content has more than tripled, from 1.5% in 1997 to 5% today, while English content has declined from 82% to 58%.
5www.global-reach.biz, consulted on February 1, 2005.
6 Established in partnership with the Université du Québec en Outaouais, the Translation Bureau, the City of Gatineau’s economic development corporation, Industry Canada, AILIA and the NRC.
7 LTRC site, consulted on February 24, 2005, at http://www.crtl-ltrc.ca/en/bref.htm#vision
