Hi all, I was member of the steering committee of the conference in Toronto and responsible of the proposals made in French. I totally agree with the opinion of Alex Kuskis. I will only add that I remember some remarks of several members of this list -- from the USA but also from English Canada -- who were very negative with the idea to have a bilingual or multilingual conference. Best Wishes Éric ---------------------------------------------- Éric GEORGE (http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~egeorge/) ---------- In my recollection the inclusion of French presenters in Toronto worked reasonably well, given the association's executive attempts to subvert the bilingual French and English presentations they had initially agreed to. As a member of the Toronto organizing committee, I recall that we felt it important for AIR to grow internationally by recognizing the bilingual nature of their Canadian conference host country. With the help of people like David Mitchell, former editor of the Canadian Journal of Communication, we secured Canadian government funding for translation services and the call for papers was duly issued in French and English. There were a sufficent number of French-speaking scholars to assess French-language proposals. Cyber-philosopher Pierre Levy was secured to present one of the keynotes and all seemed well with the world. Then, a few months before the conference, the Toronto organizers were instructed by the AIR executive to cancel the French sessions and return the government funding offered for translation purposes. The Toronto conference chair refused and was deposed by the executive group, who installed a number of recently-involved locals more amenable to their wishes. Needless to say, those of us who had worked on the conference for 2 years were devastated, but managed to get the French sessions held anyway by arranging for set-up and support. The Francophone scholars who were aware of what had happened were upset, but thanked the deposed organizers. This heavy-handedness caused considerable bad feeling and set back AIR in this part of Canada, where several people have expressed a disinclination to be members until AIR becomes more than tokenly international. I air this dirty laundry now (pun intended) because of our Vancouver colleagues expressed desire to hold the conference, the discussions about AIR in Latin America, and language on the Internet. Now, I would never expect my native language of Latvian to be accommodated by AIR (nor the Croatian that someone mentioned), but when the conference is held in countries where major world languages such as Spanish or French are spoken, and when local organizers are willing to go the extra distance to secure funding, translation and organization, leaving it to the executive to just show up, why would the association continue to insist on its anglo-centrism? The executive who decided that English was to be the association's working language in all matters was almost all-American, and all English-speaking, except for one token member. Is that reflective of an association that purports to be international? ......................Alex Kuskis ***********************