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Winnipeg airport readies for inspections en français

By: Melissa Martin

Thursday, Aug. 9, 2012 at 11:50 AM | Comments: 0

Christine Alongi (MIKE APORIUS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS ARCHIVES)

It hasn't even been open a year, but Winnipeg's new airport terminal is ready to ace a federal French test.

This fall, undercover language sleuths from Canada's bilingualism watchdog will visit eight major airports, including Winnipeg, to see if travellers are served equally well in French and English.

The inspections will check whether signs are in both official languages, staff offer a bilingual greeting to travellers and services are available in French in predominantly English-speaking parts of the country and in English in French-speaking areas.

All airports that serve more than one million passengers a year must provide services in both English and French. Winnipeg saw around 3.4 million travellers last year -- and officials at the James Armstrong Richardson International Airport say their terminal is prepared to be scrutinized.

"We have always fared quite well in terms of (bilingual) report cards," airport spokeswoman Christine Alongi said on Wednesday.

Winnipeg's terminal has the benefit of being designed for this type of situation. In 2010, representatives from the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages visited the new terminal, which was still under construction. Airport officials gave them a tour of the building to review planned French-English signage. Those signs were also reviewed with the commissioner's office to ensure they were properly translated.

"We wanted to be really proactive," Alongi said. "As Canada's newest airport, we're in a unique starting position."

Many Winnipeg airport services are offered in French, with a number of the terminal's Goldwing volunteer greeters able to speak both of Canada's official languages. The airport also boasts an information booth staffed with bilingual representatives and an after-hours translation service that can help travellers of any linguistic background.

Workers from Official Language Commissioner Graham Fraser's office will conduct more than 1,500 anonymous observations at airports in Winnipeg, Halifax, Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver. Audits of some of those airports have been done in the past, but this will be the first time so many are done at once, Fraser said on Wednesday.

"At different times, we've been looking at different aspects of what the traveller's experience is," he said. "We've looked at border services, we've done an audit of Air Canada's service to the public and now we're looking at airports."

Past audits have resulted in airports becoming more bilingual, Fraser said, pointing to airport bookstores adding French titles to their shelves, or tuning television sets near the baggage carousels to channels in both languages.

The commissioner's office said the project will include observations of Air Canada's services on the ground and in the air on flights designated as bilingual.

The commissioner's office will share its recommendations with the airports after it finishes the survey.

-- with files from the Canadian Press

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca

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Updated on Thursday, August 9, 2012 at 11:50 AM CDT:
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