Everyone Says No: Public Service Broadcasting and the Failure of Translation (review)

We live in globalized, virtual world. Immediate access to cultures near and far is a mouse click or screen touch away. We live in a mediated world where new encounters are endlessly possible and where the daily deluge of information, impossible to manage, forces choice, negotiation, and dependency. In short, we live in a world of continual remix and translation.

The play of language is fundamental to communicating meaning across cultural boundaries. But language translation is never simple or objective. It is more than transmission or the mere rendering of words; it entails situating speech in one context, remaking and relocating it to another in order to best capture or represent an original meaning. The act of translation presumes intimacy, knowledge and familiarity not only about the topic or situation at hand, but also about the audience that is dependent on the translator to understand the meanings of a text or event.

In officially bilingual Canada the act of translation is a legal imperative. But the politics of bilingual communication are complicated by the reality that only a minority of the country’s citizens are fluent in both English and French, let alone that roughly one of ten inhabitants speak another language at home. To address this demographic, various state agencies have been charged with special communications responsibilities. Chief among these is the public broadcasting service, the CBC/Radio-Canada. Under the terms of the 1968 Broadcast Act, the public broadcaster was required to deliver programming in both languages that promoted national unity. The requirement troubled some journalists who felt it compromised their independence; it was also criticized by politicians who rejected a national vision built around bilingualism and biculturalism as too restrictive or prescriptive. In 1991, the Act was modified to require that public broadcasting ‘reflect Canadian reality in its totality.’

It was no accident that the timing of these revisions coincided with a period when Canadians were floundering in the troubled constitutional waters of the Meech Lake (1987–90) and Charlottetown (1992) accords. The volatile, high stakes intensity of these debates created stark communications challenges as CBC and Radio-Canada strove to fulfill their mandate against the backdrop of what Charles Taylor calls the long history of ‘misrecognition’ between the country’s main language communities. There were many unique dimensions to each constitutional debate, but central to both were divergences, real and perceived, between the French-speaking population of Québec and the rest of Canada.

Kyle Conway’s short, intelligent book began as a dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It explores the various ways English and French coverage of the constitutional debates incorporated translated speech into prime time television newscasts. Writing from the disciplinary perspective of media studies, Conway points out that the period of constitutional crisis coincided with major technological, business, and regulatory changes to the broadcasting industry. He argues that translation actually complicated intercultural communication rather than bridging linguistic and political divides.

Although his argument would be given additional texture by more engagement with translation theory, Conway convincingly illustrates how differences in the internal cultures of the CBC and Radio-Canada made the act of translation subjective and contingent. French-speaking journalists tended to have greater second language facility than their English counterparts and, depending on the program, the preferred formats for presenting translated speech ranged from simultaneous voiceovers or subtitles to sequential narration, delivered sometimes by the reporter and at other times by the news anchor. In other words, translation entailed conscious choices and differential levels of engagement by journalists and producers, including the problematic option to merge extracts from previously translated written texts into newscasts without acknowledging that any translation had occurred.

According to Conway, nothing better illustrates the failure of translation or the media’s refusal to communicate the cultural nuances and political complexities of the Meech Lake debate than the contrasting meanings assigned to the keywords société distincte and distinct society. Whereas...