About this website

Welcome to Making your organization bilingual, an online guide and source of practical tools to help you offer services in English and French.

This site offers tools and strategies for organizations that want to foster a new bilingual corporate culture and for those who would like to improve the services they already offer in Canada's two official languages. The material is general enough to be adaptable to the needs of voluntary, private and public-sector organizations.

There is no magic formula for making your organization bilingual. Like any other process of change, the actual implementation must be tailored to an organization's individual situation and needs, phased in gradually and, above all, regularly reviewed. This website is divided into the following five main sections, providing valuable information designed to guide your organization through the process.

A bilingual organization - Discover the importance and advantages of offering French and English services to members or clients.
Implementation process - Learn how to develop an action plan for bilingualism, assign responsibilities and develop an effective language policy for your organization.
Bilingualism in practice - Benefit from a wide variety of winning strategies to help your organization successfully offer bilingual services. For example, this section looks at cost considerations, translation and interpretation, planning bilingual meetings and written communication.
Follow-up steps - Use the evaluation tools to monitor and improve your initiatives.
Best practices - Organizations from across Canada share their lessons learned in offering French and English services.

In addition, this site offers a series of Information sheets and Practical tools that can be easily customized, printed and grouped together to serve as a useful resource for your project leaders and members.

• The PDF function will allow you to print the document as it appears on the screen.
• The RTF functionwill allow you to transfer the information found in the document to your word-processing software so that you may edit it to suit your organization's needs.

The Resources and links section of the website brings together helpful links and references to materials that your organization can use to build its own collection of resources.

Tell us what you think of the website by filling out the feedback form found in this section. We also invite you to share your experiences with other organizations by submitting a best practice.

This website is also available in PDF format for printing purposes. Click here to download.

We hope you will find the information and practical tools in this guide helpful.