Report Of The Working Group On Language Matters In Icoh

A working group was established at the ICOH Board meeting in Singapore August 2000. The main task for this working group is to conduct a survey to find some necessary steps for dealing with language issues in ICOH.

The members in the working group are:

Mrs Annette Jörgensen, Sweden (Chair)
Dr Louis Patry, Canada
Prof Kazutaka Kogi, Japan
Mrs Janine Fanchette, France
Dr Ruddy Facci, Brazil (liaison to the ICOH board)

A proposal at the Singapore General Assembly

Dr Julietta Rodriguez de Villamil, ICOH's national secretary for Colombia, proposed to the General Assembly of the International Commission on Occupational Health on September 1 2000 that:

- Spanish should be considered for inclusion as the third language to be used for ICOH proceedings

- All ICOH documents such as the ICOH membership form and the brochure for ICOH 2003 should be translated into Spanish.

Main questions considered by the working group:

The provisions regarding official languages within the current constitution of ICOH under article no. 1 are as follows:

section 4. Official languages of ICOH are English and French. All official documents shall be written in one or both of these languages.

section5. The official languages of ICOH are English and French; depending on the location of the congress, additional languages may be allowed after Board approval.

The working group raised the following issues for views from the ICOH membership:

Issue No.1:

1. Should there be more than two official languages for ICOH?
2. Within WHO, how do they manage language matters?
3. The working group suggests the translation of all promotional ICOH documents such as the ICOH membership form and the brochure for ICOH 2003 into Spanish.
4. What other documents should be translated, and who will do the translations?
5. Are there other languages to be taken into consideration as additional official languages for ICOH, e.g. Chinese and Japanese? (China has today 1.2 billions inhabitants, Japan 125 million inhabitants).

Issue No.2:

1. Does ICOH need more than one official language (English?)
a. If yes, should Spanish or/and French be the additional languages? (In Latin America there are 20,000 OH-professionals using Spanish as the main language. How many of them speak English or French is not known but they do not have a second language in school.)
b. If no, will the only official ICOH language be English?
2. If ICOH only has one official language, will it be possible and convenient for future congresses to let the organisers decide what the second congress language will be?

Overall summary of views from the working group.

1. The main limitation for wider usage of one or more additional languages is financial.
- All these questions are very difficult and the considerations have to mature a bit more. However, today the working group's intention is in the direction of preparing for a third language in ICOH, and in that case it will be Spanish.

2. How to continue the work in our working group on languages matters in ICOH:
The Working Group proposes that:
- 1. Start to translate all the congress material for the congress in Brazil 2003 into Spanish.
- 2. The working group has to clarify and discuss more over the internet.
- 3. The working group meets in the fall of 2001(venue?) or springtime 2002 (Rome). On the agenda should be other questions, and practical issues such as finance.
- 4. The outcome of these discussions would be recommendations to the ICOH Board on how to deal with ICOH language matters.

3. Initial recommendations 2001 03 30

A. The organization committee of every ICOH congress can translate all their documents in the host country's language additional to English, French and Spanish.The working party suggests that it is a future task for the national secretaries to be responsible for organising the translations!

B. The official languages in ICOH in the future shall be English, French and Spanish. This means that all ICOH official documents shall be translated into these three languages.

Initial official documents are:

- the application form for membership
- material on the web site
- minutes from the general assemblies
- the constitution and bye-laws of ICOH.

The advantages in having three official languages are:

- globalization of ICOH (ICOH is accused of being too pro-Europe)
- increasing the number of members in ICOH.

The Working group welcomes views from ICOH MEMBERS on these proposals.

Annette Jörgensen, Malmoe, Sweden 2001 04 02
Chair of the WORKING GROUP on LANGUAGE MATTERS in ICOH