We have customers who would like to customize the content of the course invitation email sent to their learners to make it bilingual, ie include some text in English and some text in French. This is the email learners receive when an instructor has enrolled them via the Instructor dashboard’s batch enrollment feature.
I bet in Quebec a lot of you have already dealt with this. Maybe you found a clever way to address this? Would you mind sharing any insights you might have about it?
As it turns out, we did not find a clever way to address this here at EDUlib
Depending on the type of messages sent to the user, we rely on the language of the course and/or the language of the user.
Most of our courses are available in French only. Some of our favorite courses are also available in English. Bear in mind that their is no “bilingual” content in these courses. The course is either in French or in English.
Running a bilingual or multilingual site is a complete different story than running a site in only one language. Over the years, the people at edX have heard me complain or make comments about a lot of i18n or i10n stuff
And because French Canadian is sometimes different than French, we had to get control of fr_CA at Transifex in order to use technical terms recommended by the Office québécois de la langue française. We tend to frenchify a lot of technical terms that would be used in English as is by our colleagues at France Université Numérique for example.
At some point when I encounter an issue that does not seem to translate correctly I have to visit the Spanish version of edx.org to check if it is an issue with our fork or a general issue with translations. Hours of pleasure from release to release…
Hi Pierre, I really appreciate your reply! And thank you for sharing your experience of running a bilingual or multilingual site. Yes, I can understand this definitely adds a whole new level of complexity.
Also I love the term “frenchify”! I think I’ll steal it on some occasions
I’m not very familiar with the law in Quebec (or in Canada), but heard there might be some bilingualism requirements, so I’m wondering if it’s actually required by law that a web site or a web app operating in Quebec (or in Canada) or who’s targeting a Canadian or Quebequoise audience has the emails (sent to the end-user, e.g. course invitation email, account activation email) bilingual in French and English?
Linguistic politics notwithstanding, I would assume that if you deal with the federal (canadian) government there might be some bilingual requirements.
At the provincial level, especially in the Province of Québec, you might get away with only French if your target audience is strictly francophone and this does not involve any kind of relationship with the provincial government. From memory, I believe only New Brunswick is considered a bilingual province.
Under regular registration, a user would register in French or in English. That solves the issue. When you register yourself a user then I would agree you might have to supply instructions in both French and English since you cannot assume if the user is francophone or anglophone. I am not lawyer. But depending if the course is dispensed in English I would assume communication in English only would be fair. The same in French if the course was in French.
I know there were discussions about multilingual courses at some point during one of the recent Open edX Conferences, but I don’t believe that went very far… Not necessarily a priority from what I understand and I don’t think I would be able to hide or not asked to test it if something was developed in order to cover multilingual courses.
