French Is An Approved Language

Air Safety Week, March 21, 2005

Our observation that the French accident investigation bureau, the Bureau d'Enquetes et d'Ananalyis (BEA), posted on its Web site only a French language report of its investigation into the June 2003 crash of a Canadair regional jet near Brest prompted a variety of criticism (see ASW, Jan. 24). Among the more interesting observations, that the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) limits itself to English, ignoring America's Hispanic and Chinese minorities.

According to the BEA, "It is true that it was published in French, but an English version is under way."

"More and more, important reports published by the BEA are translated into English and made available on our Web site," the BEA official told us.

"By the way," he added, the crash investigation of the Flash Air B737 at Sharm el-Sheikh in January 2004, presents an interesting case. "The investigation is still going on in Egypt with both the [NTSB] and the BEA participating. When the preliminary report was issued Nov. 11, 2004, the Egyptian commission issued it in English. Because the large majority of victims were French, it was very difficult for us to gather all the families in the following week to explain to them the report. It was given to them as we received it, as translating a 400-page technical report takes time. So this situation was just the other way around."

According to one source, the posting of accident reports - in any of the approved languages - on the Internet is not required by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), Annex 13. It is only some national regulations that make it mandatory to release an accident report to the public, and this is notably the case in the U.S., Canada, and all European Union member states.

In Canada, of course, it is required by law to provide both English and French versions of all documents. Taiwan, although not a recognized sovereign state, decided to post an English language version of its report of the crash of China Airlines Flight 611, a Boeing B747 that broke up from metal fatigue. U.S. agencies, like the NTSB and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), as well as the manufacturer, were heavily involved, so the English version made sense (see ASW, Feb. 14).

In the case of the Concorde crash in 2000, the BEA posted both a French and an English language version of the accident report, and that no doubt reflects the fact that the airplane was a joint production effort involving the English (see ASW, Feb. 11, 2002).

There are six ICAO languages (English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Chinese). The Global Aviation Safety Network (GAIN) Working Group C looked at the feasibility of a computer-based system that would permit dialogue between the six languages. In its October 2004 report, the GAIN group reported it was forced to abandon the task:

"A centralized translation process will require translation services for every possible language pair. Two languages will result in two language pairs supporting translation from language A to language B and the reverse. The number of language pairs that a centralized process requires is equal to n(n-1), where n is the number of languages used by the participants. Supporting the six ICAO standard languages will require 30 language pairs. In a distributed processing topology, each site would need to support up to 5 language pairs. The total number of language pairs would be the same as for a centralized process, but there could be multiple instances of each language pair. The benefit would be based upon the number if participants and the number of languages. The primary difference would be in the number of ... servers needed to support the system. In either case, the resulting cost is prohibitive.

"Machine translation is a developing technology ... Simple evaluations and product literature research did show that the more accurate translators tend to be more expensive. The WC (Working Group) C believes that given a realistic budget for machine translation products could not support the cost of [translation] with the minimal acceptable accuracy."

However, the paper did note that English is used in radio communications, and that more personnel are becoming fluent in English as a result. Therefore, the paper concluded that the cost of machine translation is unnecessary.

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