Some progress has been made regarding the participation of Francophone scholars in ICA events for the past 5 years, but we still have a long way to go before we can really talk of a presence of the French-speaking world in our association. As I am writing these lines, we count only 10 ICA members from France, one French-speaking member from Belgium (our next ICA president, François Heinderyckx!; the 18 other Belgian scholars being from universities that represent the Dutch-speaking part), one from Switzerland (while the 19 other Swiss scholars come from universities representing the German-speaking part), and seven members from Canada (especially Quebec)¹ .

Why is it so and how can we improve this situation? I would say that the Francophone world is, in a way, victim of its past and current success. Spoken by 110 million native speakers as well as 190 million second language speakers, French is the official language of 29 countries around the world and can still claim to be one of the main languages used on planet Earth (along with, of course, Mandarin, Spanish, English, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian or German)² . The critical mass is still there, which means that scholars who write and publish in French still have a sense that they can be read by a community of researchers and contribute to knowledge.

To this, we could add the long-standing competition between French and English languages, a competition that has, of course, some political resonances. As someone who publishes mainly in English, I often hear indirect criticism from my fellow French colleagues who consider that writing in “la langue de Shakespeare” is nothing less than a form of treason that should be highly discouraged. Furthermore, young French scholars are not encouraged or even trained to write in English, a situation that, of course, prevents them from participating in our conferences. In comparison, we still see a lot of scholars publishing in Mandarin, Dutch, or German, but these scholars also know that, in order to make their work more visible at the international level, they have, whether they like it or not, to publish in English, our new Lingua Franca.

So what can we do to improve this situation (if we consider, of course, that such a situation is problematical, something that many French-speaking scholars would, I think, question)? One of the projects I worked on as a president was to make ICA more international, which led me to ask the internationalization committee of our association to work on procedures that would facilitate the organization of ICA regional conferences. With this new initiative, which also came with more money – $10,000 USD – given by ICA as sponsorship for these events, we were able to sponsor a conference in Lille, France in March 2012, which was, I think, a big success in terms of participation and networking. Symptomatically, though, around half of the presentations were made in French during this conference, since it was out of question that French-speaking scholars would present their work in English in a French town! The result was that these scholars presented their work to only to the French-speaking audience, while English-speaking scholars were able to reach a bigger crowd.

Another initiative I participated in was, for instance, to coedit a special issue of Management Communication Quarterly devoted to Organizational Communication research in France, which allowed French scholars to get their work known at a more international level. However, my feeling is that this kind of project will remain anecdotal as long as these scholars do not decide to get their hands dirty, so to speak, and really start a true conversation – in English, yes – with the rest of the world. I see sometimes what I consider to be encouraging signs, with some senior and young scholars who decide to “play the international game.” However, I also see discouraging ones when I read the brilliant work of a young French scholar, who then tells me that his English is too poor to allow him to participate in our conferences.

I believe that it is, of course, a matter of time, so my hope is that we can keep working on this aspect, showing, for instance, that publishing in English does not mean that we have to give up our identity or pride. There is always a part of treason in any translation (treason regarding what we mean, but also who we are), but translation is the only way we have to spread our ideas and make our work known at the international level. Yes, for sure, traduttore traditore, but a little betrayal is the necessary law of exappropriation…

1. Although it is hard to be exhaustive, I was not able to identify any scholar coming from the French speaking part of Africa, which represents a big portion of the French-speaking world.

2. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language