It was very important to me because I was going to international conferences to talk about Franco-Ontarians. And I was proud to say, well, we’re also an interesting object of study for thinking about the role of minorities in political life, et cetera.
Hello, my name is Linda Cardinal, I’m Associate Vice-Rector at the University of French Ontario in Toronto. I trained as a sociologist at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and when I was younger, I was very interested in the sociology of social movements, and gradually I became interested in the sociology of public action, public policy. I was interested in how actors participate in action, and my actors were the French-speaking community, the French-speaking community in a minority setting. At some point, I switched from sociology to political science, here at the University of Ottawa. And there, well, I was invited to really work on developing the whole field of minority studies, but also language policies.
In my more scientific work, I’ve been very interested in redefining the notion of language regime. That’s where I tried to contribute to the advancement of knowledge and also to advance thinking on minority groups, always through the case of Franco-Ontarians, Francophones in a minority setting. And in the field, well, I’ve done a lot of work to influence public policy, but also to work on community development. And that brings up all sorts of paradoxes, when you’re a researcher, i.e. do you only try to advance knowledge as a researcher, or do you also have a responsibility towards your community?
But in our universities today, there’s a demand for impact. It’s a big question, the idea of what impact an academic should have in his or her community or on policy or on the economic front. And there’s all kinds of talk about it, and I’d like to see more research on this issue, because there’s now an industry, I’d say, of research impact. So this impact needs to be measured, but there’s not just one way to have an impact. Personally, I’d like our governments to recognize the many ways in which we can have an impact. In other words, knowledge can contribute to a knowledge economy, but it can also contribute to the common good. We can have a media impact, in other words, contribute to the literacy of our population. Yes, we can have an economic impact. We can also have a social impact, in other words, all those who are fighting poverty. There’s also the impact on our students: we want to train the next generation. So there are all sorts of ways of making an impact, and all sorts of means of making an impact. And, today, I’d say we shouldn’t just think of our impact in economic or economistic terms. We also have to think in social terms, and for the Canadian Francophonie, among others, this is fundamental. We also need to give ourselves the means to have this impact, and especially in the current context, i.e., we’re so bombarded by misinformation, by all kinds of issues, that it’s important that our public, that our community can be made aware of all this in its own language. That’s why the humanities and social sciences should be required to publish in French, and researchers should be given incentives to do so. Today, we feel penalized. We have data showing that there’s a problem; fewer and fewer people are publishing in French, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, and that’s perhaps the problem. In particular, the Acfas study on the situation of researchers in minority environments, which was piloted by Vincent Larivière in 2021, shows that our object of study is the minority environment, often involving issues of identity, issues related to the Francophonie, health and minority environments, education, early childhood and immigration. These are themes that are very important to us. But we know that these themes are of interest to French-speaking audiences. And here we have an audience to talk to, on a scientific level as well as on a community and social level.
That doesn’t mean they can’t publish in other languages. On the contrary, dialogue between different scientific cultures can be very interesting. In Canada, we’re in a really good position: we know English, we know French, we know French traditions, we know American traditions, we know the Anglo-Saxon tradition, and we’re able to blend these traditions in our work, which leads to some interesting results. There’s already a lot of translation going on, with French speakers publishing in English, but also translating their texts and publishing them in French. Because there are still some French-speaking researchers who think it’s important for their texts to be accessible to a French-speaking public.
Translation also means translating concepts from one language to another. And that’s really interesting, and I’d like to see, for example, the Portuguese-speaking political science or sociology association, the Spanish-speaking ones, working together, the Japanese, working together. Trying to translate, taking concepts and translating them. So there’s all that. And for me, translation is also about translating scientific traditions between us, to go beyond a single way of thinking, which would be the Anglo-Saxon way of doing science or research.
But when it comes to translating work in sociology, political science or the humanities and social sciences, very little funding is allocated to translation. In the past, there were royal commissions of inquiry in Canada, and there everything was translated. Everything that came out in French was in English; everything that came out in English was in French. This was excellent for research and for dialogue between French and English speakers in Canada, because we had texts in French that had been translated and could be read in English and vice versa. I find that lacking. We need translation support programs. There are a few, but it’s a field we really need to occupy more, and occupy it well, doing things right to encourage publication, dissemination and promotion of our work in different languages.
