(Quebec) No less than three quarters of companies do not respect the standards of written French in Quebec in their public display, concludes the Quebec Office of the French Language (OQLF), but it would be partly the fault… of the pandemic.
These are the results of a study by the OQLF made public on Tuesday. The organization stresses, however, that in most cases this does not interfere with the general understanding of the communication.
This exhaustive search looked at more than 10,000 “messages” written in business signage in 2021, in four major regions, Montreal, Quebec, Sherbrooke and Gatineau.
It was thus noted that a quarter of companies, or 26%, have an outdoor public display that does not show any deviation from the norm, but that 74% of companies display messages that contain it.
The average number of deviations observed in posting was higher on the Island of Montreal than elsewhere.
What differences?
By discrepancy, we mean typos, spelling or grammatical errors, borrowings most often from English and syntax errors. Among the errors scrutinized, pleonasms, English quotation marks, inopportune ampersands or missing letters, etc.
However, the OQLF specifies that in nearly half of the cases, the discrepancies noted can be “considered difficult to detect without an advanced knowledge of the rules of written French”.
One-third of the errors listed are typographical errors, “linked, for example, to the use of a capital letter instead of a lowercase letter or to the writing of telephone numbers, times, dates or price whose format did not correspond to the prescriptions of reference works such as the Linguistic Troubleshooting Bank, the Grand Dictionnaire terminologique or the Antidote software, ”we explain.
And furthermore, only 1% of the deviations noticed can actually decrease the clarity of the message.
The average number of discrepancies was higher in businesses such as grocery stores, butchers, supermarkets, convenience stores, food services, entertainment and manufacturing businesses. On the other hand, faults are less present in clothing stores.
Blame it on the pandemic
In addition, many of these errors would be attributable to the period chosen to conduct the study. The sampling was indeed collected in the spring of 2021, in the midst of a pandemic.
However, 9% of the messages analyzed were related to the health measures put in place, but they accounted for no less than 17% of the deviations noted. What is the link with pandemic?
“Many of these time-limited messages (often printed with a simple desktop printer or even handwritten) could have been drafted without going through the usual processes companies go through before displaying text in their storefront or on their building,” we read.