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Comment by abrowne | Hacker News Reader

Last year, someone signed up for PO box-equivalent with my firstnamelastname@gmail.com address. (Not the first time this guy in Montréal forgot that his email has a 0 before the @gmail.com. Or an error from the person entering it in.) I live in the US. I have lived in Canada, but over 10 years ago now.

The only two options to contact Canada Post were phone or … Twitter — which I don't have an account for — no email or web form. And the phone CSR had to get a manager who still couldn't figure out how to deal with the issue since I wasn't a customer myself and just wanted my email removed from the account.

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You can try cmg@canadapost.postescanada.ca

Good to know if there's a next time.

I forgot to say that another option was to contact them by mail, so at least they're dogfooding ;-)

The domain is canadapost-postescanada.ca

It's cute in Canada, they would feel the need to go so incredibly far as having the domain bilingual, rather than just registering two separate domains and pointing them to the same address. If you actually (for God knows what reason) struggle so hard to see the similarity between French and English in this two word identifier, then surely putting them both on the same domain is only going to cause issues?

Canadians take our bilingualism seriously. To a degree that calling it "cute" would be offensive to many. It's the law that French and English need to be displayed & provided "together" in government services, I presume this is to avoid any issues there. "The Official Languages Act is a Canadian law that came into force on September 9, 1969, which gives French and English equal status in the government of Canada" (although I believe in Quebec, French is by law to be displayed before or over English)

How do you do for contracts? Is there a prevailing version or both translations are prevailing ?

Here in Hong Kong English supercedes if presents and next door in Shenzhen it's the opposite.

English deals are done in English, French deals are done in French, if a deal is done in French or English the courts are adequately able to deal with either being bilingual. There are some exceptions around jury trials, I'm not sure it's a right in a jury trial, however I doubt very much it would be an issue. Everything standard form from the government comes printed in both French and English.

It's fine when you're solely reading something. Your eyes gaze to what you understand. Just like a product manual that comes in 20 languages.

Where this approach falls flat is web domains. It requires you to actually type out both the language you know; along with a language you (likely) don't. Quick Google only 1.2% know both.

And as pointed out above, then figure out if those variations are separated by a dot, underscore or hyphen. Notwithstanding the domains get ridiculously long.

It's good we try to please everyone, but sometimes the politeness goes too far. Registering the domains in both French and English in this case should have been more than sufficient.

It's not being polite in this instance, it's satisfying a law. We are not being "polite" to the French Canadians, the French Canadians consider themselves distinct.The Quebecers would not tolerate it any other way, and we'd go back to separatist conversations in Canada. This isn't being polite, it's politics and deep rooted societal issues (that should at some point be resolved imo, also imo, it's a total utter travesty we offer everything so strictly in French and English to preserve the culture, but screw offering it in Ojibwe for the natives, boils my blood, but that would be being polite.)

They did get in trouble after all. https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/mobile/canada-post-s-english-onl...

This somewhat makes sense as it mentions the page content itself was in French. However then "solving" the problem by making a domain with both languages hyphenated only magnifies the issue more - to indicate an expectation you should know both languages.

Any logical personal will understand showing content in multiple languages (as text output); but when it comes to user text input (domains, web search etc), it's absurd to believe the same rules should apply for the user.

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