CBC Saskatchewan is on a roll with their 3rd article in a couple days investigating the infrastructure and communication issues with Environment Canada and the Meteorological Service of Canada. The picture thats coming together from all these news articles is that high-level policy is impacting the ability for meteorologists in this country to do their job well and communicate effectively. Were passionate about the weather here at A Weather Moment, and as anyone in this country who is interested in the weather knows, all these problems have existed for quite a while and have long gone ignored or untouched. Hopefully other media outlets also catch on and explore the state of the weather service in Canada. In the latest article, CBC takes a look at how our official language laws have prevented Environment Canada from utilizing social media outlets for something meaningful. Tweets telling Canadians that geese can live for 20 years take the place of timely watch and warning information because the Official Languages Act mandates that all government communication be in both official languages. Since its unrealistic for every meteorologist in the country to be fluently bilingual, EC has been developing software that will allow forecasters to send out tweets that are translated instantly. I imagine that 1 year timeline is probably optimistic since the same phrases in french and english are likely very different character lengths and Twitters 140 characters (minus 22 for the link to the watch or warning) doesnt exactly leave much room for variation. This is also why theres a delay on the actual text for watches, warnings, advisories and special weather statements on Weather Office – the canned phrases are automatically translated, but the body of the warning has to be translated by a human being, so they prevent *any* text from appearing until its available in both languages. In previous cases this has meant that a tornado warning is issued and shows up on Weather Office, but the text explaining where the tornado is, where its heading and how fast its going doesnt show up for another 10-15 minutes. Its increasingly clear that perhaps the products EC is offering arent the problem; it could just be that people are not receiving them directly from EC in effective means; radio DJs constantly misread EC forecasts, news outlets can be really ambiguous as to whose forecast theyre actually reading are, and many missed warnings may very well have been issued but just not heard or received by the public. How do you think Environment Canada could improve communication given the OLA requirements? Do you think it would be appropriate to post the primary language text immediately and have the translated version in the non-primary language as soon as can be done?
Posted on: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 00:19:38 +0000
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