<div dir="ltr"><h1 itemprop="headline" id="headline" class="">Brazilians Speak Portuguese, but the Olympics Must Use French</h1>
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<p class=""><span class="" itemprop="author creator" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">By <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/sarah_lyall/index.html" title="More Articles by SARAH LYALL"><span class="" itemprop="name">SARAH LYALL</span></a></span><time class="" datetime="2016-08-10T01:17:44-04:00" itemprop="dateModified" content="2016-08-10T01:17:44-04:00">AUG. 9, 2016</time>
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<span class="">Michaëlle Jean is the
secretary general of the International Organization of la Francophonie.
“It’s a struggle each time you have the Olympic Games, in a different
country and a different city,” she said.</span>
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<span class="">Credit</span>
James Hill for The New York Times </span>
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<p class="">RIO
DE JANEIRO — Michaëlle Jean, secretary general of the International
Organization of la Francophonie, spent a recent morning at the sultry
Lagoa Olympic venue, where the world’s most exciting rowing was taking
place. She was not so interested in what was happening on the water.</p><p class="">“You
will notice that the commentators are not speaking French,” she said,
indignantly. “In the venue, none of the signs are in French.”</p><p class="">Monitoring
the use of French at the Olympics is a frustrating and quixotic job,
particularly when the Games are being held in a non-French-speaking
country preoccupied with non-French-related matters like street crime,
economic chaos and how to cram thousands of excitable spectators into
the beach volleyball venue. But Rule 23 of <a href="https://stillmed.olympic.org/Documents/olympic_charter_en.pdf">the Olympic charter</a>
states that the Games have two official languages, and Ms. Jean’s
organization, which represents 80 Francophone countries, is determined
to make sure nobody forgets that one of them is French (the other is
English).</p><p class="">“It’s
a struggle each time you have the Olympic Games, in a different country
and a different city,” Ms. Jean said. “We must be there to make sure
the French signs and documents and information are there. We have 3,000
athletes and a lot of people in the public from Francophone countries.”</p><p class="">Rule
23 is no accident. As the founder of the modern Olympic Games at the
turn of the 20th century, Pierre de Coubertin got to choose what
language they would be in, and he was French. But as the century wore
on, and English became more dominant as a common international language,
French usage at the Games began to fall by the wayside. This alarmed
the French-speaking world and the <a href="http://www.francophonie.org/IMG/pdf/Press_Kit_French_language_in_Olympic_Games-2.pdf">Francophonie organization</a>, one of whose goals, it says, is to “combat the perverse effects of globalization on languages.”</p>
<p class="" id="story-continues-1">At each Olympics since Athens in 2004, the group has appointed a person known as le Grand Témoin — the Great Witness — <a href="http://www.francophonie.org/Le-Grand-Temoin-de-la-Francophonie-46498.html">whose job is</a>
to make the case for, and keep track of, French usage at the Games.
This year’s Grand Témoin is the internationally celebrated jazz
saxophonist Manu Dibango of Cameroon. (Ms. Jean, a former governor
general of Canada, had the job in London in 2012.) Responsibilities
include negotiating with the International Olympic Committee and the
host country, closely monitoring the French situation at the Games, and
producing a report afterward.</p><p class="">The reports tend to reflect a mixture of hopefulness and dismay.</p><p class="">“In
Beijing, all Olympic signage appeared first in French, then English and
Chinese,” the Sochi report says, for instance. “In Sochi, the signage
addressing the international audience was trilingual, but that
addressing the spectators appeared in Russian and English.”</p> <a class="" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/sports/olympics/french-official-language-olympic-games.html?_r=0#story-continues-2">Continue reading the main story</a>
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<p class="" id="story-continues-3">In
addition, it pointed out, “the arrival of some new sports to the
Olympic program (slopestyle and halfpipe) was not accompanied by a
terminology sufficient for these disciplines to be discussed with French
terms in the media.”</p><p class="">The
Olympics are “obviously a very important showcase,” said Mr. Dibango,
who is also serving as a cultural ambassador, performing with Brazilian
and French-speaking musicians in Rio as a way to promote the
international nature of French.</p><p class="">“I see the job as being the flag-bearer of the 300 million people around the world who speak French,” Mr. Dibango said.</p><p class="">The
average member of the public may have little idea that any of this is
going on, but the Francophonie organization takes the issue so seriously
that no sooner does one Olympics end than it starts negotiating the
terms of the next one. Early discussions about French at the Rio Games
were positive, Ms. Jean said, because the Brazilian government was
sympathetic and because Carlos Nuzman, the president of the Brazilian
organizing committee, speaks fluent French.</p><figure id="Rio-Newsletter-Promo" class="">
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<p class="">But
then the economy collapsed and the friendly government fell. When the
new government came in, it had a lot on its mind, and that did not
include the use of French at the Olympics. As the day of the opening
ceremony approached, the Francophonie organization had no idea how the
evening — traditionally a fine time for the world to hear and appreciate
a lot of beautifully enunciated French spoken by important
international officials — would go.</p><p class="">It
turned out to be a runaway success. All the main announcements and
speeches were delivered in French, along with English and Portuguese.
Even better, Ms. Jean said, “everything was announced first in French —
did you notice?”</p>
<p class="" id="story-continues-4">The
opening ceremony is one thing; the rest of the Olympics is another. Ms.
Jean visited the athletes’ village, only to discover that there were
French-language signs in the cafeteria but nowhere else. She attributed
it to Rio’s budget woes — translation is expensive — and the frantic
nature of pre-Games preparations. While she understood, she said, “We
were very disappointed at the situation.”</p><p class="">Visitors
to the Games, too, will see that the thousands of signs at the various
event venues are printed only in English and Portuguese, not in French.
(Not that the English signs are anything to get excited about, seeming
at times to owe more to Google Translate than to a sentient being.
“Press the wheelchair button if you have locomotion issues,” a sign next
to an elevator at the media center reads. )</p><p class="">At
the rowing venue on Saturday, the events moved along so quickly that
sometimes it was all the announcers could do to pack in the commentary
in both Portuguese and English, never mind any other languages. In the
stands, several (non-French-speaking) spectators said that, to be
honest, language was not at the forefront of their minds.</p><p class="">“I hadn’t really thought about it,” said Amy Burba, 44, of Virginia. “But I heard the people behind us speaking French.”</p><p class="">Scott
MacRae, a Scottish chef who was holding a beer and wearing his Union
Jack on his head as a form of sun protection, said that except at the
opening and closing ceremonies, French should be kept out of the
Olympics.</p><p class="">“I
like the French passion,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s appropriate
to use French at the Olympics when you have them in a country that is
not France.”</p><p class="">Several
older-generation rowing officials at the site bemoaned the loss of
French not just at the Olympics but also in sports (and in the world) in
general. Americans in particular, they said, do not speak other
languages and do not really want to.</p><p class="">French
used to be the official language of rowing’s governing body, FISA, but
it is now used less frequently, said Jean Christophe Rolland, FISA’s
president. Even FISA, whose acronym stands for Fédération Internationale
des Sociétés d’Aviron, has had to adopt a zippy English co-name, <a href="http://www.worldrowing.com/fisa/">World Rowing</a>, which it uses for “commercial purposes” but which is slipping more and more into the rowing lexicon, he said.</p></div></div><p class="">As
Mr. Rolland talked nostalgically about the days when rowing meetings
were held in French and English speakers had to listen to the
translation on headphones, the Rolling Stones song “(I Can’t Get No)
Satisfaction” began playing over the loudspeakers.</p>
<p class="" id="story-continues-5">“It’s a daily fight,” he said. “A daily fight.”</p><p class=""><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/sports/olympics/french-official-language-olympic-games.html?_r=0">http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/sports/olympics/french-official-language-olympic-games.html?_r=0</a><br></p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">**************************************<br>N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its members<br>and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message. A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)<br><br>For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to <a href="https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/" target="_blank">https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/</a><br>listinfo/lgpolicy-list<br>*******************************************</div>
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