Tiphaine Compernolle
email: c_tiphaine@hotmail.com

Doctorante Ater

Professeur Chrystelle Richard
email: richard@essec.fr

The "Generalized Other" or How to Make its Voice Heard in an Audit Committee*

Keywords: processus du comité d'audit, voix des administrateurs, collégialité contrainte, autrui généralisé audit committee process, directors' voice, contrived collegiality, generalized other

 des autres membres du comité. "L'autrui généralisé" agit alors comme un censeur.

INTRODUCTION

Even if the audit committee is a corporate governance institution established in Europe for fifteen years, we know little about the working of these committees. We know the number of meetings, the charge of attendees which is communicated through the financial statements but no minutes are disclosed. The question about how audit committees work remains entire.

The European Directive of 17 may 2006 on statutory audits of accounts states the topics the audit committees have to tackle. Nevertheless the European Directive does not explain how the directors do for tackling these topics. The assignments given by the European Directive to directors are these ones: a) monitoring the financial reporting process; b) monitoring the effectiveness of the company's internal control, internal audit where applicable, and risk management systems; c) monitoring the statutory audit of the annual and consolidated accounts; d) reviewing and monitoring the independence of the statutory auditor or audit firm, and in particular the provision of additional services to the audited entity.

What does "monitoring" or "reviewing" mean concretely? What do exactly the directors? If we refer to the corporate governance codes used in France -codes which have a legal enforcement with the institutionalization of the "comply or explain" principle -the audit committee "has to assume two of the main missions of the board of directors: the management monitoring and the checking of the reliability and the clarity of information which will be given to shareholders and to financial markets" [START_REF] Bouton | Pour un meilleur gouvernement des entreprises cotées[END_REF]. So the audit committee has to "monitor", to "check" and to "review" the topics which concern the audit committee. The question about what the directors do actually to "monitor", to "check" and to "review" remains entire. The external auditors have also a mission of monitoring and of reviewing. By the way of concluding their mission, external auditors write an audit report which expresses their opinions about the quality of company's financial statements. Such as the external auditor with his audit report, the audit committee chairman gives audit committee's conclusions during the meetings of the board of directors. Nevertheless as regards the external auditor the audit report is not the only moment for expressing his opinions, he can express also these throughout the audit process. Indeed the audit process has been described as a relational process [START_REF] Richard | Why an auditor can't be competent and independent: a French case study[END_REF] in the course of which the auditors express their opinions to company's financial team. This situation involves the existence of negotiations between external auditors and company's management [START_REF] Beattie | Behind the audit report: a descriptive study of dicussions and negotiations between auditors and directors[END_REF][START_REF] Beattie | Behind closed doors: what company audit is really about[END_REF][START_REF] Gibbins | Evidence about auditor-client management negociation concerning client's financial reporting[END_REF][START_REF] Gibbins | Negociations over accounting issues: The congruency of audit partner and chief financial officer recalls[END_REF]. Is it the same way for the audit committee directors? Do they express their opinions or their disagreements to the financial management or to the internal and external auditors? The terms "review" or "check" which are used for describing the audit committee missions do not allow us to suppose that the audit committee expresses itself. The previous research works which were interested in the understanding of the audit committee process [START_REF] Spira | The audit committee: performing corporate governance[END_REF][START_REF] Spira | Black boxes, red herrings and white powder: UK audit committees in the 21 st century[END_REF][START_REF] Gendron | Getting inside the black box: a field study of practices in « effective » audit committees[END_REF][START_REF] Gendron | On the construction of audit committee effectiveness[END_REF][START_REF] Turley | Audit committee effectiveness: informal processes and behavioural effects[END_REF] had not really asked the issue of the expression of the audit committee directors. Even if these research works show an expression of the audit committee directors, they only show that the audit committee directors ask some questions to the management. This issue is central since it is a matter of determining if the audit committee is a passive corporate governance institution which is satisfied with perusing issues and with informing the board of directors about these issues (it "checks" and it "reviews") or if the audit committee is a corporate governance institution which could disagree, ask some changes and give some orientations to the management about the issues it is aware (it "monitors"). In order to determine in which extent the directors express themselves and to understand the way they use to do that, we conducted 27 interviews with audit committee directors, CFOs and external and internal auditors of French companies listed on the CAC 40 index of the Paris Stock Exchange. We find the directors express themselves beyond asking questions even if the context of expression is not favourable for them. Nevertheless this expression appears only in the course of a conversation. Because directors' opinion is not expected by the management or by the auditors, the directors cannot express their opinions in a strong manner.

They rather suggest, they rather get over some messages they consider as important in the course of conversations. These conversations do not necessarily take place during the formal audit committee meetings. Informal meetings occur, between the audit committee chairman and the management team or the auditors.

The next parts are devoted to a literature review on the audit committee process (1), then to a description of our interviews-based method (2) and finally to the presentation of our results on the way to express yourself when you are a director in an audit committee (3).

THE AUDIT COMMITTEE PROCESS

This research work will be situated inside the audit committee research area and a particular attention will be given to the definition of our research subject: the audit committee process (1.1). Finally the studies able to help us to give some start responses to our research question will be presented and discussed (1.2).

The audit committee: formal and informal processes

Two literature reviews are mainly quoted by researchers: the one of DeZoort and al.

(2002) and the one of [START_REF] Turley | The corporate governance effects of audit committees[END_REF]. [START_REF] Turley | The corporate governance effects of audit committees[END_REF] suggest to classify different research on audit committees according to the nature of identified effects audit committees could have: effects on agency costs, effects on auditing, effects on financial statements quality, and effects on corporate governance quality. As [START_REF] Dezoort | Audit comittee effectiveness: a synthesis of the empirical audit committee literature[END_REF], they suggest to classifying works on audit committees' effectiveness according to audit committees characteristics that explain this effectiveness: composition, resources, authority and process.

In this framework, [START_REF] Gendron | Strengthening the financial reporting system: Can audit committees deliver?[END_REF] suggest a synthesis of these two classifications: they consider the three characteristics of audit committees described by DeZoort and al. (composition, resources and authority) as they express themselves during the audit committee process. The presence of the audit committee could have several effects that Gendron and Bédard have identified.

[Insert Graph 1 Here]

Our research paper mainly tries to understand the audit committees' process, that is to say the way they are working. We are keeping in mind this process has consequences on auditing, on financial statements. We are also keeping in mind that this process is dependent of audit committee's composition, resources and authority. Nevertheless these specified characteristics do not constitute our main research object.

Few works define really the audit committee process. [START_REF] Dezoort | Audit comittee effectiveness: a synthesis of the empirical audit committee literature[END_REF] consider the audit committee process as a whole of procedures directors implement. [START_REF] Turley | Audit committee effectiveness: informal processes and behavioural effects[END_REF] differentiate the formal process, which corresponds to the audit committee meetings, to the informal process, which corresponds to the whole of contacts between the directors and the other attendees outside formal meetings. As [START_REF] Spira | The audit committee: performing corporate governance[END_REF] highlights, some documents are prepared before the formal audit committee meetings. As these documents have the only goal to be presented to the directors, their preparation is considered as a stage in itself of the audit committee process. This preparatory stage, which takes place before the formal meetings, is the time of the construction of documents and presentations that will be done during the audit committee meetings. It includes also the informal meetings that occur between the audit committee directors (represented by its chairman the most of the time) and the other attendees. These informal meetings constitute what [START_REF] Turley | Audit committee effectiveness: informal processes and behavioural effects[END_REF] call the informal process, that is to say conversations in the course of which the directors could be led to give their points of view about various topics. Some of them could be held without the presence of any directors, as [START_REF] Gendron | Strengthening the financial reporting system: Can audit committees deliver?[END_REF] describe. After this preparatory stage, a formal meetings stage comes, what [START_REF] Turley | Audit committee effectiveness: informal processes and behavioural effects[END_REF] call the formal process.

During this formal meetings stage, some presentations are given to the directors. These last ones try to form their own opinion both about the presentations that are proposed and the people who make these presentations. Some questions can be asked and give rise to answers.

A discussion, sometimes an argument, then starts and the directors can be led to express their points of view. Finally a conclusion stage follows the formal meetings stage. During this conclusion stage the audit committee chairman gives a report about the audit committee meetings to the board of directors, the minutes are distributed.

As the audit committee process is defined and the process stages in the course of which the directors express themselves are identified, it is time to take an interest in the previous research works which can bring a light to our research question: the issue of an opinion expression by the directors to others audit committee meetings attendees.

The questions and answers game

Through the descriptions about the audit committee working, a way of expressing used by directors is especially highlighted: asking questions. During the audit committee meetings and during informal meetings between the audit committee chairman and some of others formal meetings attendees too, a "questions and answers game", as Spira ( 2002) calls, appears. This questions and answers game lasts as long as an answer seems satisfying the director in his opinion. The directors begin the game and decide when they want the game stops. [START_REF] Spira | Audit committees: begging the question"?[END_REF] distinguishes three levels of questions. The first level corresponds to foreseen questions for which written answers have been prepared. The second level corresponds to foreseen questions for which no answers have been prepared. And the third level corresponds to not foreseen questions. Acting and answering favourably to a third level question make feeling more comfortable the participants to the "questions / answers game".

The good answer constitutes a proof of the audit committee effectiveness, more precisely of the ceremonial effectiveness. As [START_REF] Gendron | On the construction of audit committee effectiveness[END_REF] underline it, the existence of questions asked by the audit committee members and the recognition of the abilities of the directors to ask the good questions -that is to say the questions which hurt -constitute a shared sign about the well-working of the audit committee. So it seems that all questions have not the only purpose to be informed. These questions aim some tacit messages on audit committee effectiveness too.

Nevertheless [START_REF] Spira | Black boxes, red herrings and white powder: UK audit committees in the 21 st century[END_REF] underlines that one of the important rules for the audit committee working is to operate in a consensual manner. In order a board of directors or an audit committee works well, a consensus does necessarily exist. Indeed the tension which could exist between attendees could harm the good working, the good processing of the audit committee. This need to keep a consensus is clearly in competition with the need to ask questions.

These research studies seem to show that the directors express themselves in a certain extent, but only in a certain extent. It remains to explore the specific context of the audit committee as the space of directors' expression and to determine in which extent the directors express themselves beyond asking questions. The next part will be devoted to the description of the qualitative method we have used.

METHODOLOGY

After having discussed the French case (2.1), we present the qualitative method used for the data collection and give the way we analyse the speeches (2.2).

Audit committees in France

According to the UK Cadbury Code (1992), French people have a corporate governance code: the Viénot report (1995). This report led to the emergence of the audit committees in France [START_REF] Piot | The existence and independence of audit committees in France[END_REF], since it recommends its establishment. The "concept" of audit committee from this Viénot report (1995) is directly imported from the Anglo-Saxon reflections. The codes of good governance that followed (Viénot 2, 1999;[START_REF] Bouton | Pour un meilleur gouvernement des entreprises cotées[END_REF]Combined Code, 2003) The essence of Anglo-Saxon requirements for audit committees is unquestionable: the emphasis is on the structure (composition: independence and financial expertise, etc.) rather than the process, few pieces of information are given on the content of mission assigned to the audit committee. Few divergences exist, for example concerning the sustainability of the audit committee. It has to be composed in 2/3 of independent directors. The independence is defined similarly to the Anglo-Saxon world apart for the fact that the quality of independence is lost after twelve years and not after ten as it is recommended by the Higgs report (2003). In parallel, by the application of the LSF ( 2003), the rotation of audit partners is every six years, that is the statutory audit mandate. However, the rotation rule is not uniformly respected, including the CAC 40 companies.

The data collection

The study aims to analyze the expression of an opinion from the directors to the other participants of the audit committee process. So such a study has the ambition to contribute to open the audit committee « black box ». The best way to access to this reality is the direct observation. Though this "black box" remains also strongly impenetrable for the researchers.

Indeed the access to the audit committee meetings did turned out impossible because of some confidentiality reasons. As for the access to the informal meetings, it is impossible to observe these meetings because they are confidential by nature, the interest of these meetings lying in the fact that they take place without the presence of an external glance, even researcher's glance. So as the audit committee working remains unobservable for the researcher, this research work relies on the speeches of attendees who are: the audit committee directors, the external auditors, the internal auditors and the CFOs. The speeches collection has been done through interviews with attendees of the audit committee meetings of CAC 40 companies (CAC 40 is the Paris Stock Exchange). The interview partly can catch the lived facts and collect a first interpretation of the actors who live the audit committee experience as [START_REF] Blanchet | L'enquête et ses méthodes : l'entretien[END_REF] underline it: « The survey by interviews is the preferential tool of exploring the facts of which the speech is the principal vector. These facts concern representation systems (constructed thinking) and the social practices (experienced facts) ».

So the research approach used here is interpretative and comprehensive in the sense of [START_REF] Weber | Essais sur la théorie de la science[END_REF]. The CAC 40 companies are the first ones in France which have created an audit committee, following the recommendations of the Viénot report in 1995 [START_REF] Piot | The existence and independence of audit committees in France[END_REF]) because of their greater exposure. These companies have a relatively old practice about the audit committee. So we can assume that they will have richer practices.

Twenty-seven semi-directive interviews have been led with eight external auditors, with eight audit committee directors who have an independent status and whose four are the audit committee chairman, with four CFOs and finally with seven people in charge of the internal audit function (summary table of interviews is available in appendix 1). On these twenty-seven interviews we have the permission to register twenty-two. These twenty-two interviews are also transcribed in entire and sent to interviewees in order that they control the contents. As regards the fifth interviews that cannot have been registered and transcribed, some notes have been made during the interview. Because of the absence of transcription, these interviews cannot have been the object of a meticulous content analysis but they have contributed to feed our reflexion.

The analysis approach has been in several stages. First the interviews have been analyzed individually in order to identify the main themes and especially the themes that are common to the different interviews. Then a transversal and thematic analysis has been led

with a manual encoding. The chosen unit for the encoding has been the paragraph of sense.

This process, as [START_REF] Miles | Qualitative Data Analysis[END_REF] underline, has allowed to produce a used volume of data in excluding the paragraphs that did not concern the research question. Finally a second analysis, interview by interview, has been made to comprehend the construction of interviewees' speeches and to bring to light the contradictions that can exist during the speech [START_REF] Bardin | L'analyse de contenu[END_REF].

The interpretation of the speeches is based on the works of two different researchers: [START_REF] Hargreaves | Teacher's work and culture in the postmodern age[END_REF] who is an education sociologist and [START_REF] Mead | Mind, Self and Society[END_REF] who is the founder of the social psychology. Their respective works allow us to interpret the audit committee process as a "contrived collegiality" [START_REF] Hargreaves | Teacher's work and culture in the postmodern age[END_REF] and to understand the directors have to be able to internalize the " generalized other", i.e. conventions and expectations emanating from participants with whom they interact [START_REF] Mead | Mind, Self and Society[END_REF].

HOW TO MAKE ITS VOICE HEARD: THE ROLE OF THE DIRECTORS IN AN AUDIT COMMITTEE

The audit committee does not constitute an easy place for the directors to express themselves because the audit committees can work as a "contrived collegiality" (3.1). So the directors have to create relationships favourable to the development of a "culture of collaboration" which favours directors' possibilities of expressing themselves (3.2). In this space for expression, directors contribute to construct the "generalized other" [START_REF] Mead | Mind, Self and Society[END_REF] and, on this basis, suggest rather than impose (3.3).

A contrived collegiality

The internal and external auditors and the financial team members meet a lot throughout the year. They have a close relationship as between peers, a relationship based on confidence [START_REF] Richard | Why an auditor can't be competent and independent: a French case study[END_REF]. So these people do not wait the audit committee meetings to collaborate or to exchange their points of view. They do that when the issues arise throughout the year. On the contrary the contact with the directors is not continuous. The audit committee meetings constitute the reserved place for exchanging the points of view between the auditors and the financial management on the one hand and the directors on the other hand.

Nevertheless exchanges of opinion are not automatic; it depends on attendees' wishes. Indeed the external auditors are not in a situation such as they are accountable to the audit committee directors. They do not lead their missions in aid of the directors but in aid of the public interest. So they have not to consider directors' opinions as relevant to their missions. As regards relationships between the financial management and the directors, it exists a clear demarcation between management's mission that is managing and directors' one that is monitoring. The management team could see a too strong expression from the directors about certain issues as interference in its own mission: managing. Consequently directors' expression and the acceptance of this expression are possible only if a sharing and collaboration atmosphere exists; everybody must be aware to hear the others. The question about the collaboration and the understanding is also stresses: Are the directors and the other attendees able to speak and to hear themselves about the subjects that an audit committee has to monitor? The analysis of interviewees' speeches let to think that an important risk for the audit committee is that it works as a "contrived collegiality" in the sense of [START_REF] Hargreaves | Teacher's work and culture in the postmodern age[END_REF].

Hargreaves (1994) describes the "contrived collegiality" with several characteristics: it is an imposed collegiality, not voluntary, sometimes compulsory; it has a specific aim which is known in advance and the tackled subjects are determined outside, not by the participants;

the collegiality is limited in the time and in the space; finally, the result of this collegiality is also known in advance. Hargreaves shows that this contrived collegiality is indeed a travesty of collegiality. The participants do not really participate; they reject it.

Hargreaves' work constitutes a good analysis model of the audit committee working as a context for the directors' expression. It seems that the audit committee starts to work as a "contrived collegiality" and this contrived collegiality let few place for directors to express themselves. Indeed certain contrived collegiality characteristics are met during the formal audit committee meetings. The first of these characteristics is that the meetings are limited in time and in space. They have a planed duration that has to be respected. The meeting begins at an exactly time and finishes at an exactly time too, only letting a short meeting durationmost of time two or three hours -as an external says us:

« It begins at 1: 30 pm, and it finishes at 3: 30 pm, not 29, not 31. » (A3 -F4)

The fact that these meetings spend a short time constitutes in attendees' eyes a constraint for the good discussion working by limiting the discussion depth. This lack of meeting time flexibility avoids the sharing of points of view between the directors and the other attendees and avoids a real collaboration as the same external auditor underlines:

« Finally, people meet two hours, so, two hours from time to time, well. If we want to have a technical discussion, it won't be two hours, so... We will take a day or an afternoon. » (A3 -F4)

A second of contrived collegiality's characteristics is met in the audit committee working. It is the fact that the topics which are the object of discussion are not determined in function of attendees' need. There are not the attendees who determine the discussed issues in order to obtain directors' point of view for example. The discussed issues are more determined in an institutional manner. Especially the accounts constitute the main conversation object for the audit committees. And so the accounts take a significant time of these meetings. It cannot really let time for others subjects which can be chosen by meetings attendees. It is this idea that we find in the speech of a chief of internal audit:

« But inside, it is necessary to be realistic… I would say that two thirds of subjects are almost dictated by reglementary duties: the cut off options we would want to do before the end of year, the annual statements, the biannual statements… […] So, it is… we have a lot of duties which are dictated. » (F8)

These few elements added to the fact that quoted companies have the legal or institutional obligation (because of the good corporate governance criteria asked by financial markets) to settle an audit committee explain the fact that these audit committees work as a contrived collegiality. The audit committees also work as a travesty of collegiality, as a ceremony in the sense of [START_REF] Spira | The audit committee: performing corporate governance[END_REF]. It involves that the audit committees are playacting where only a few place exist for the sharing and so for the expression of the audit committee directors about their preferences and their expectations. The fact that the audit committees work as a contrived collegiality involves the negative effects highlighted by [START_REF] Hargreaves | Teacher's work and culture in the postmodern age[END_REF], that is to say the appearance of a mistrust between the directors and the other audit committee meetings attendees, even the appearance of a rejection of directors' points of view by the other attendees. Indeed company management members cannot trust directors who finally meddle in the company's management. A fear to lose the control on their missions for the benefit of the directors can appear in management's mind as a chief of internal audit underlines:

« The audit committee, it is credible when it plays its audit committee role, not when it takes itself for the management. » (F8)

This same fear exists for the external auditor. The external auditors role is to challenge the financial management when it takes some doubtful accounting choices. This role is not directors' one. So we find this fear to lose the control on their missions and so on their status in this external auditor's sentiments:

« For example, we have a little debate with F4, about technical, complicated subjects, we have to discuss. They don't like we speak about that in front of the audit committee because they are always afraid that people, badly informed, begin to contradict some decisions, some issues about which, nevertheless, we, auditors and company, we agreed. Because they don't understand well, because, I don't know, because they find that it isn't the proper way. That, that is a little bit boring because… It seems to me that we have to feel, both sides, company and auditors, if at some point we handled a complicated issue and we found a satisfactory technical solution, we have to fell sufficiently strong... We could have this paradox. The audit committee gives itself some rights superior to auditor's ones in a sense since it supervises, oversees our activity. And as a result, they say to us « I don't understand why you said yes to the company ». And so there, so there, we would be in a little complicated situation. » (A3 -F4)

That lets to think that the formal audit committee meetings constitute a difficult context for directors to express themselves. As this last interview extract lets to think, the audit committee meetings attendees other than the directors could be in a position as they reject the possible collegiality or collaboration. It involves that the expression of points of view by the directors can be lived as an intrusion in their personal territories. If this intrusion is really felt, as it seems the case in the company F4 which is the subject of the interview extract above, the company management as the auditors would try to forget to disclose some subjects during audit committee meetings, avoiding that the directors give their points of view or their preferences or the directors ask questions.

So this contrived collegiality situation can has as consequence to withdraw all the matters which could be objects for the collaboration. The directors can be in a situation such as they are not conscious of the main company issues, issues about which they would want to express themselves if they knew. Directors' voice cannot be heard, because they do not know the issues. As [START_REF] Turley | Audit committee effectiveness: informal processes and behavioural effects[END_REF] underline, the audit committee directors depend of the information the other attendees want to show him in a certain extent.

Nevertheless this situation has limits as regards the internal auditors. Indeed the internal auditors can be hierarchically accountable to the directors on the contrary to the financial management members and the external auditors. So giving an account and giving informations they have is a part of their missions as an audit committee chairman says:

« And so, I think that the person in charge of internal audit has a double responsibility. He is accountable, of course, to the management, to report to the management the whole of his recording. But he is accountable to the audit committee in the same way. » (F3)

The fact that internal auditors are accountable to the audit committee directors let these last ones express their opinion about the presented issues in a more favourable context.

Then they have a greater freedom of tone -a freedom to make biting remarks -comparing with the financial management members or with the external auditors. It is what an external auditor says:

« If it is about the audit, it [the audit committee] goes rather far. I want to say that… the internal audit, in the sense that it isn't rare that they say « On such point, your way of seeing things seems to me insufficient. Our experience, etc. It is necessary to see that again. » » (F10)

As regards the financial management or the external auditors, the directors cannot express themselves without the existence of attendees' will to collaborate, since the directors depend on others to obtain relevant information [START_REF] Turley | Audit committee effectiveness: informal processes and behavioural effects[END_REF]. As such, they cannot allow themselves to bully the external auditors or the financial management members.

It is what says an external auditor in a prudent manner:

« So, it is the question of, the audit committee intervention is enough, enough complex because that is, that is a question of proportions between..., to where to go too far and, to where to go not enough far. That's right it is rather difficult for audit committees. » (A3-1)

As the audit committee meetings have tendency to work as a contrived collegiality, the possibilities of the audit committee directors to express themselves in an audible manner are small. So in order to give a real role to the audit committee and to have a real possibility of expressing themselves, the directors have to create an atmosphere and a collaboration such as they have relevant information on the one hand and they have a possibility of expressing themselves in the other hand.

A culture of collaboration

In order to have more possibilities to express themselves the directors, have to make the audit committee evolves to a "culture of collaboration" [START_REF] Hargreaves | Teacher's work and culture in the postmodern age[END_REF].

In opposition to the contrived collegiality, [START_REF] Hargreaves | Teacher's work and culture in the postmodern age[END_REF] describes another type of collegiality or collaboration: the "culture of collaboration". He defines this "culture of collaboration" with several characteristics which are opposed to the "contrived collegiality" ones: this collaboration is spontaneous and voluntary because the participants recognize an interest in that; it is more informal, not fixed in the time and the space, according to the participants' needs; people choose themselves the subjects of this collaboration; finally, the results of this collaboration are not known in advance. In a context of "culture collaboration" all attendees are free and equal, that is to mean that the directors have not a particular place which can give to their voice an influence with regards the others attendees. For creating this particular context, the directors have to act with tact. They are not in a situation such as they can demand. They have to take some sufficient precautions in speaking in order that the financial team members or the external auditors do not lose their face, in the sense given by [START_REF] Goffman | Behavior in public places: Notes on the social Organization of Gatherings[END_REF]. They have to be cautious during the public interactions in order not to offend anyone, in order that attendees' status remains intact. It is what an audit committee chairman implies in these words:

« About the accounts, I would say that in a general manner, it is enough rare the audit committee finds something unsatisfactory in the accounts. On the other hand, when it finds something, it isn't done like that. If you want, as a rule… an audit committee has a dialogue with the CFO and sees the issues which are, about which an hesitation can exist. » (F10)

The directors are totally conscious of this situation. They are aware a good working of an audit committee rests on the existence of good relationships between the directors and the other attendees. These good relationships allow the directors to obtain relevant information and to create the opportunity to express themselves. These good relationships only can exist in a relaxed atmosphere. For having this atmosphere, it is necessary to create it. An audit committee chairman explains:

« That should not be a court, if we want that oysters close … So, I think it's necessary to have, in the same time... I want to say... a minimum of respect and the feeling of obligations to be receptive. » (F3) Also this mutual respect atmosphere (even an mutual equality atmosphere), allowing the face maintenance of all attendees, is recognized as an important component of the effectiveness of an audit committee. As an external auditor underlines, he considers the audit committee meetings as an exchange time, as a dialogue when the collaboration becomes possible. It is necessary that a feeling of equality does exist between the attendees:

« Now, I don't feel I'm on the gril, if you want. It isn't a questioning. It is really.., for me, it is an exchange. […]

There are the financial management, we, the committee members. So, everybody speaks alternately. There is, on certain points… yes, there are exchanges of sight about some subjects. I prefer the term exchange than examination. » (A1-1)

Thus it is important that the directors and the other audit committee attendees feel equal in order that the dialogue is considered as possible. That is the first necessary condition in order that a collaboration could exist. The construction of this feeling about the status equality is the product of interactions during which the directors play an active role Establishing the dialogue is the first element that the audit committee directors introduce in order to establish the collaboration. A second element which is tried to be created by the directors is a confidence relationship with the other attendees. Trust is a complex feeling. The directors cannot impose to other attendees to trust them. They only can create a climate which is favourable for the appearance of this confidence. The discussion tone during the meetings is also an important element for establishing a confidence climate. Another possibility to create this confidence is to organize others meetings than the formal ones. These meetings in other place and in other time can be more favourable for the establishment of a close relationship. These meetings outside the formal audit committee meetings and outside the company seem rather being meetings during which only the audit committee chairman is present with one or two other people -auditors or financial team members. These meetings aim to assemble few people in order to establish a more particular relationship which can becomes more private. An audit committee chairman explains us that regularly he takes lunch or dinner with company's external auditors in one hand:

« Personally as the audit committee chairman I had got used to meeting for the lunch, personally, the external auditor, alone together, to discuss about all issues.

[…] For these lunches, I lunched or they came to see me at home, so that there is a real conversation, on the one hand an extremely free conversation, and on the other hand, if you want, a little less professional contact with the external auditors than, within the audit committee. » (F12)

He tells also his meetings with the chief of internal audit:

« The chief of internal audit had got used to coming to see me at home, personally and alone together, two or three times per year. So, before the meetings, he came to say it to me… It was very free! […] We spoke two hours, two hours and half. » (F12)

Diverse elements can be highlighted in these interview extracts. It is indeed at the audit committee chairman initiative that these private meetings take place. He expressly expresses the fact that these meetings aim to create a little less professional relationships, that is to say a a little bit closer in order to allow the appearance of trust. These meetings rest on the dialogue and on the discussion. Finally the audit committee chairman has the external and internal auditors for lunch, at home, that seems to us a very big mark of consideration from the audit committee chairman to the auditors, who can feel most obliged to the same consideration about him in return. In the case of the meetings with the external auditors, the meeting takes place during the lunch, what gives a little different tone to the meeting. Even if the main aim is for the audit committee chairman to obtain relevant information and to have the possibility to express himself, this purpose is partially diverted by the lunch activity which is more favourable of the exchanges. These more informal meetings are a means for the audit committee chairman to show his great receptiveness to his guests. This message from the audit committee chairman, that is to say "I am available to discuss with you when you need" is well understood. The financial management and the internal auditors ask for having meetings in order to discuss and obtain audit committee chairman's point of view. Indeed the chairman seems to be the directors with who they discuss the more. It is what a CFO says to us:

« Myself, from time to time, I can visit the audit committee chairman, to have a totally independent sight, take a coffee with him to talk about this and that. » (F6)

The audit committee chairman, and the other directors in a less extent, try to establish an atmosphere of respect and equality by being constructive and respectful as regards other attendees' status. They try to create a dialogue during the formal meetings and outside the formal meetings especially with the audit committee chairman. Finally this last one tries to show a very great receptiveness of listening and advising for the auditors and for the financial management. In doing that the audit committee achieves to create moments when it can express itself and be heard, especially through the audit committee chairman voice.

Sometimes the CFO or the internal auditor asks for a meeting in the only purpose to collect his point of view. The relationships establishing between the audit committee chairman on the one hand and the financial management or internal auditors in the other hand get closer to a « culture of collaboration » [START_REF] Hargreaves | Teacher's work and culture in the postmodern age[END_REF]. Indeed the collaboration becomes spontaneous, voluntary, appears on the initiative of the auditors or of the financial management members. It is not planed and takes place rather in informal surroundings manner: during a lunch or around a coffee. Finally the discussion subjects, that is to say the collaboration subjects, are not determined by an external agenda. They correspond to the actual concerns. This description resumes all the characteristics of the « culture of collaboration » as [START_REF] Hargreaves | Teacher's work and culture in the postmodern age[END_REF] defines it.

Nevertheless this culture of collaboration rests a lot on trust. But trust can only appear through time. It seems evident that it is the repetition of meetings -firstly aroused by the audit committee chairman who wants to show his great receptiveness -which can create some confidence relationships. Then the auditors or the financial management members ask, themselves, to have these meetings in order to obtain audit committee chairman's point of view. The possibility for the audit committee to express itself can be analysed only in a dynamic way, by keeping in mind that it is this culture of collaboration which can allow the audit committee to work beyond an contrived collegiality. These audit committee chairman's words underline the importance of time in the construction of confidence relationships:

« They [relationships between the directors and the other attendees] progress. When a trust relationship builds between the management, the external auditors, the audit committee… It is more effective for company's good that trust relationships exist rather than the relationship simply remains on a formal level, for the reasons I just said before. But this trust relationship, it depends on people, it can build or not. And when it builds, it always takes time. There has to have a certain perpetuity in the audit committee composition, in the audit committee chair to build this mutual knowledge and this trust. And that isn't always done in a good way and isn't always done fastly. But I think that's important. » (F5)

As this audit committee chairman underlines, trust relationships so as the culture of collaboration can be reached or not. Even if the audit committee chairman has an active approach to create trust relationships, that is to say relationships which will allow him to express himself through the dialogue, the creation of these relationships depends on financial team members and auditors' will too. They can accept these relationships or not. But since trust and so culture of collaboration have been built and exist, they exist as well during the private meetings as during the formal meetings. The culture of collaboration constructed during the private meetings continues to exist during the formal audit committee meetings as a CFO underlines:

« Even if the presentation in itself is formal, there are documents, the external auditors express themselves in an argued way, the discussion in itself is a discussion between people knowing well in the course of years and expressing themselves in a very free and informal way. » (F7)

Because the directors are not able to express themselves in contrived collegiality surroundings, the directors try to create favourable moments for the collaboration. A culture of collaboration can appears especially in the initiative of the audit committee chairman. This culture of collaboration allows the directors, especially the chairman, to express themselves.

The attendees of the audit committee meetings can ask also to meet the audit committee chairman in order to collect his point of view about the issues they have chosen. Nevertheless the expression of these points of view only take place during conversations between equal people, what can have certain consequences about the receiving of the message by the other attendees.

The generalized other

In order to maintain this culture of collaboration, the directors always have to be cautious about the manner they express themselves and about the tone they use. The directors also express themselves without having to spell things out. They express themselves with messages which are not completely explicit but sufficiently understandable.

These messages are passed through the questions they ask, questions which are full of allusions. The themes tackled during the meetings constitute indications about the subjects considered as important by the directors. They can modulate the depth of questions, stress more or less on certain issues. They also make some remarks, some suggestions. Most of the time the remarks are expressed by the audit committee chairman during private meetings not really during formal meetings where only questions are asked. Thus the directors express themselves by suggesting. Suggesting is their main way for expressing themselves. Moreover, remarks' recipients feel the expression of directors' points of view as suggestions, as a CFO says:

« The audit committee can be led to give suggestions, advices, which we, normally, take into account, and which are then integrated in the presentation sent to the members of the board of directors. » (F7)

A consequence of the fact that the directors express themselves by suggesting is that the financial management such as the external auditors feel free to take into consideration or not these remarks or suggestions or advices. They have a freedom feeling which is intrinsically linked to the fact that the interactions take place in a culture of collaboration.

Without this culture of collaboration, the directors could not express themselves. But the existence of this culture of collaboration involves that the directors are in position such as they are only advisers who make suggestions. This freedom feeling seems to be stronger for the external auditors than for the audit management members. Indeed the CFO whose comments are reported just above underlines that taking into consideration directors' remarks is a normal situation with his words. In the extract of an interview with an external auditor just below, the auditor says he considers taking into consideration directors' suggestions as a possibility:

« So, conversely, from the conclusions or the remarks made by the audit committee, we effectively can always deduct that, there are certain issues which interest them a little bit. And responsibility to us, eventually, to adjust a little bit more your external audit process to these fields. » (A3-2)

Nevertheless even if the directors have only a power of suggesting, their suggestions can be fruitful. For beginning the financial management and the auditors take into consideration what the directors want to say, they attach interest to it. That is to mean that they accept, during a moment, to follow what are expressed or suggested by a director -most of the time he is the audit committee chairman. It is connected to the fact that the directors are responsible for the quality of financial statements too. But even if the financial management or the auditors listen directors' messages or suggestions they stress that they remains the only responsible for their choices or their opinions. That is what an external auditor says:

« The great difficulty about our jobs, it's cause there are technical components -That, it is simple -and some assessment components. We besides have to say on which foundations we have taken assessments. By definition, the assessments, it becomes less easy, less direct. So, people can estimate in a different way. After, the whole, it is to move the points of view closer together and to well understand why, why each has his position. Then at some point we take back our role and each his responsabilities. » (A1-3)

By reasoning as the directors do, the external auditors as the other attendees internalized audit committee directors' expectations. These expectations, which are suggested, are internalized through what Mead calls "the generalized other". [START_REF] Mead | Mind, Self and Society[END_REF] considers every individual possesses the ability of reflexivity: he is able to understand the mind of people with whom he interacts. He will be able to analyze his own behaviour as if it is about the behaviour of another person. This detachment allows the individual to internalize certain conventions and expectations emanating from people with whom he interacts. These internalized conventions and expectations constitute "the generalized other", which constitutes a censor for the individual. However "the generalized other" does not dictate individual's behaviours. The individual remains free to adopt a behaviour different than the one waited by people with whom he interacts. The construction of this "generalized other" is made through the language, gestures or attitudes that are interpreted during the interactions between individuals.

The generalized other constitutes some keys for analyzing own behaviours, keys that every people have. These keys help people to analyze the choices they have to make. Then the financial team members, the internal and external auditors possess these keys of analyzing.

Some new keys are added with their interactions with the directors. It allows them to analyze their own behaviours towards the social role they have to play. Simple suggestions that are repeated can have effects on people. A form of social control is exerted. That is the purpose that the directors want to reach, as an audit committee chairman explains:

« Indirectly, certainly, in the extent that the works and the debates of the committee, I say, as they are registered by our interlocutors of the financial management, end up having an echo, in the way they, in the way they present financial information. Because, they have registered that such or such aspects are considered as important. So, they see to it that the information doesn't get lost, or is drawn in one way or another. […] It is for the impregnation. » (F3)

Directors' suggestions, even when they are implied, then have effects that are perceived by the directors. These suggestions are internalized in financial team members' mind or auditors' mind through their generalized other. This generalized other acts as a censor.

Better will be the culture of collaboration, faster will be internalized directors' wishes and the less these ones will need to express themselves. So, it is absolutely possible that the directors who do not express themselves during the audit committee meetings do not that either because they do that outside the formal meetings or because their wishes and expectations are internalized yet. It is what an audit committee explains when he says us why the audit committee never asks to change the internal audit plan:

« But, we never had really, it seems to me, asked to add something to what is proposed to us. We have our agreement… And they knew that on certain points, we were more demanding. So almost without needing to ask they put it in their audit programme. Even if directors' expression is given only onto the tone of the suggestion, it has an impact. The audit committee directors have a voice that is heard. These suggestions are the object of attention by the financial team members and by the external and internal auditors because they consider that the audit committee directors potentially can have quality opinions.

Then, the financial team members, the external and internal auditors listen these remarks, they perceived the messages because they are aware. They interiorize directors' expectations and sometimes can answer to these expectations. Nevertheless in order that the audit committee can have this voice and this power of suggesting, a culture of collaboration has to develop within the audit committee, not a culture of mistrust as the contrived collegiality.

CONCLUSION

Expressing themselves is not an easy thing to do for the directors. The audit committee institution organized around formal meetings does not give favourable surroundings for the expression on the one hand and for the listening of this expression on the other hand. Indeed, expressing one's self only in order to express one's self without being heard has a limited interest. Directors' expression only has an interest if it is heard, in order that this expression contribute to improve company's management and contribute to the quality of the financial statements. The only formal audit committee meetings do not constitute a favourable moment for the expression because they work as a contrived collegiality in the sense of [START_REF] Hargreaves | Teacher's work and culture in the postmodern age[END_REF]. Sometimes the directors try to transform this contrived collegiality into a culture of collaboration. For that, they favour the way of discussing both during the formal meetings and outside. The audit committee chairman creates informal meetings with the financial management members or with the external or internal auditors, always with very few people.

These meetings aim to create trust relationships in establishing a mutual knowledge, more private, between the audit committee chairman and the financial team members or the external and internal auditors. These meetings also aim that the guests understand that the audit committee chairman is available as an adviser when it needs. A culture of collaboration is also built. Nevertheless as the directors and especially the audit committee chairman express themselves only during conversations, they cannot impose their points of view. They only have a power of suggesting. The financial management members as the auditors seem to take into consideration audit committee's suggestions and expectations because the directors are responsible for the quality of financial statements too and because they have a different angle of sight. They are not accountants, they are managers. Then the financial management members and the auditors internalize directors' expectations which feed their generalized other [START_REF] Mead | Mind, Self and Society[END_REF]. The generalized other acts as a censor of behaviours. So directors' suggestions can have an impact.

Expressing themselves in an audible manner depends on the existence or not of a culture of collaboration for the directors. This culture of collaboration does not exist in itself.

It needs some efforts from the audit committee chairman who plays a central role in establishing confidence relationships with the financial team members and with the external and internal auditors. These last ones are not obliged to accept these relationships. As an audit committee chairman said, the creation of trust depends on people. It needs also time. Time and efforts are the main components to reach this culture of collaboration. What requires a great involvement and a great receptiveness as well as relational abilities of the audit committee chairman. These relational abilities, the abilities to create trust relationships, is a

  have reinforced the Anglo-Saxon filiation. However, until the transposition of the 8 th directive, in December 2008, which legalizes the existence of audit committees, the establishment of an audit committee wasn't mandatory. More, it came into conflict with the Article 230 of the Companies act 1 . The establishment of an Audit Committee was simply recommended by the codes of good governance from professional organizations and AMF. In practice, almost all of the listed companies had already established such an audit committee at the end of 2008 (AMF, 2008). The decree of the 8 th December 2008, under the DDAC law (2008) mandating the establishment of the audit committees for the listed companies, has only endorsed an already strong practice.

  […] They saw well what the audit committee waited. » (F12)The financial management members as the internal and external auditors admit a value of directors' points of view since they internalized them, and they sometimes take for their own account. The authority of the audit committee that comes from the authority of the board of directors is not the only reason why a value is admitted to directors' suggestions. It comes from the fact that the quality of these suggestions is admitted. The first quality of directors' points of view that is recognized is the externality of these points of view. The directors are not accountants; they have more non-specialized profiles. Then, they can have a point of view a little bit different than other attendees' ones because they have another angle of sight which can be perceived as interesting by the financial management or by the external and internal auditors. The audit committee directors then allow internal auditors, external auditors and the financial management members to test or to challenge their own opinions. The audit committee can become a sounding board because the directors are able to bring a fresh sight of the issue due to their job and their experience. It is what a CFO expresses with these terms:

  . It is what an internal auditor chief underlines in the following interview extract:

« When I took up my post, a little apprehension because, we don't know together [him and the the audit committee]. Still, I don't know the audit committee members. All the other attendees, even the external auditors, we know them. We don't know how it goes, we don't know which questions are asked. At once, they put you comfortable. » (F9)

  « And the comments we can make… Sometimes, he [the audit committee chairman] makes comments, we say ourselves… I don't see the issue. And after a moment, you notice that it is effectively an issue which has... Because he has, a vision, a prism different of your which is totally financial. Him, he has a prism which is much wider. And as a result, he is going to ask you some questions about things, which he eventually doesn't understand or… you go to notice that he has a very interesting angle of sight and it allows you to complete your point of view, to solidify it. » (F1)

This section prohibits the communication between external auditors and a small group of administrators for ethical reasons. The auditors could not speak before the Board as a whole. Professional secrecy of the external auditors was not raised in respect of the Audit Committee. In practice, boards of directors, however, have lifted the obligation of external auditors.

skill little considered in the previous research studies which are interested in the audit committee skills. Finally the audit committee chairman plays a central role in the creation of possible moment for audit committee's expression. More widely it seems that it is him who create a living, interesting, useful and effective audit committee or not.

Appendix 1: Summary table of the interviews


Laurent Romary
email: romary@loria.fr

Nathalie Mehl

David Woolls

The Lingua Parallel Concordancing Project: Managing Multilingual Texts for Educational Purpose

This paper describes some technical aspects of the Lingua Parallel Concordancing Project which aims at managing a multilingual corpus to ease students' and teachers' work in second language learning. More specifically we show some implementation issues of the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines and the corresponding tools which we have developed.

Introduction

A multilingual corpus for parallel concordancing

The proposal for a parallel concordancing project put to the Lingua bureau of the EU originated in the desire of a group of lecturers from different European universities 1 to enhance the use of concordancing in the process of learning a second language. Concordancers have already been widely used in teaching [START_REF] Tribble | Concordances in the classroom[END_REF]Johns & King, 1991). The concordancer can be used by a teacher to obtain teaching material relating to specific grammatical content or used by a student for free exploration of the use of a word in context, and in many ways in between. Concordancers are built into the large corpora of English language held by Cobuild and the British National Corpus. They are also available for the smaller user in programs such as the do-it-yourself approach of Tribble & Jones and in commercial programs such as MicroConcord [START_REF] Johns | Micro-concord: a language-learner's research tool[END_REF]). University users have long had access to the Oxford Concordance

Program. What all these have in common is that they are designed to operate in a momolingual environment, even though they may be capable of handling more than one language.

Multilingual corpora are also currently being built for exploration of language. Notably, another EU project, Multext, is building such a corpus with the express intention of making it available for the development and assessment of tools for multilingual text handling. This will contain some parallel texts, but only as a small component of a wide range of texts in many languages. 1 The University of Nancy II (France), the University of Birmingham (UK), the University of Hull (UK), the University of East Anglia (UK), the University of Wuppertal (Germany), the University of Turin (C.L.A.U., Italy), the University of Patras (Greece), the University of Arrhus (Danemark).

However, to perform parallel concordancing one clearly requires parallel texts. The pedagogic aims of the project on which we are working also have this requirement, with the added constraint that all the translations used must be of sufficient quality to provide accurate information for teachers and learners.

The identification, assessment and collection of these texts is outside the scope of this article, but an indication of the range of material is given to indicate why such a corpus is desirable. The texts in progress include children's literature, general fiction, a play, journalism and technical manuals. The six languages of the initial project are Danish, English, French, German, Greek and Italian.

The purpose of such a diversity of literature is to provide as wide a range of examples of translation of words and phrases in different environments as is possible within the constraints of a corpus of what will always be of a much smaller size than the monolingual corpora size. It is also to allow exploration to be restricted to one or other grouping or genre. It is hoped that the corpus will provide material for teachers at all levels of education.

For those of us creating the management system for such a corpus, the variety of text types and conventions provides a major administrative problem, and it is because of this that it was decided to recommend the application of the TEI guidelines to the project. We need to be able to identify and differentiate between source languages and translations, group into genres, acknowledge copyrights and above all align the texts, and provisions for all of these elements and more are included within the TEI guidelines. To have attempted to design our own system would have been adventurous, to say the least. It seems to the authors, if not necessarily to all our colleagues, that the considerable effort in applying the guidelines to the corpus, will allow us to produce a working concordancer much sooner. For those intending to follow this route, it should be pointed out that presenting a fully encoded text to a group of linguists can be a nerve-wracking experience as you try to explain why you have trebled the length and made it totally unreadable in the process.

Making the corpus manageable

As indicated above, in a multilingual corpus there is no real alternative to modifying the plain text as presented by the various sites. We will discuss below four of the major components in the corpus maintenance process; header management, character encoding, paragraph and sentence slicing, and text alignment. The first allows the classification and identification of documentation to meet international standards and makes the corpus accessible to others in the long term. It also will allow the use of material produced by other research centres and institutions who have been working on TEI. The second allows text to become machine readable irrespective of the source of the input or the desired method of output, by applying the rules of the TEI/SGML syntax to the text. The third is necessary both for the alignment process to oprate and to allow flexible and clear concordance presentation. The fourth is the structure on which the retrieval process can operate. By combining the information of these four elements words and phrases can be retrieved with any amount of context, for particular groupings of texts, in any selected pair of languages. This amount of information and degree of flexibility cannot be obtained from a monolingual concordancer operating on plain text. The different applications require very different approaches to corpus management.

Different steps in the archiving process

Header Management

A header is supposed to allow a speedy introduction to the remaining document. At a glance one has to obtain a general idea of what the document is about and how it is rendered.

The TEI working committee has recommended putting a header in all textual documents. The TEI guidelines give a very detailed explanation about how to use, to build and optimize the header. Apart from a few elements which cannot be missed out according to their obligatory status, the header construction seems very permissive and may take any shape depending on who it is made for and what kind of information it should bear. To be more precise, the TEI offers either a nearly infinite list of tags with unique meaning which produces a nearly infinite degree of depth of the header or alternative tags such as
 allowed to contain information of any kind for which particular tags are not provided explicitly by the latest publication of the guidelines. Such permissive rules of construction allow remarkable extensions to the potential use of the header.

The TEI compulsory <teiHeader> element mainly gathers bibliographic information. It supplies the user with quick general information on the contents of the electronic file such as the <title>, the <author> and its <extent> (i.e. size). These are the user's first criteria of choice. If the user doesn't know the works or novels available in the corpus, his choice may be influenced by the list of <keywords> found in the header and giving a text or text class description. For example let us imagine that a non-English-speaking scientist, researcher, engineer or whatever his professional position is, is working on an English report of a international conference on polymers and needs the translation equivalent to the verb 'to dilute'. He might have more chance of finding the proper meaning in already translated chemical reports, books or tutorials rather than in literary documents such as Shakespeare plays.

The multilingual aspect of a text is not taken explicitly into account in the current header. The <langUsage>, <language> and <lang> elements as well as the lang attribute rather refer to foreign languages, for exemple latin quotations, existing within the current document.

In the context of the Lingua project, before choosing a text the user first has to check if it exists in the language he is interested in. An element describing the different existing translations submitted to the alignment program mentioned in the TEI guidelines in chapter 14.4.2. Alignment of parallel texts would be very useful for our purpose. The following proposals of additional tags have already been made to the TEI responsibles : We leave it to the working committee to judge whether such elements are sufficient for the TEI users or not. For the moment in order to stay TEI conformant we decided to include this information in a <respStmt> element as follows, while waiting for more explicit elements to be created : The first stage of our parallel multilingual concordancing sofware consists in word or phrase searching.

The user enters a word or phrase which he wants the translation of in a input field of the Mosaic 2 interface and the software browses through a corpus of texts and looks for the wanted expression. This does not pose any problem as long as the corpus of texts is not too large. But this kind of problem comes up very soon. The user will see himself obliged to choose the texts where he wants the translations to be taken from. Our role is to give the user an easy way of making the right choice of texts. Thus, if the user of the file needs further explanations about encoding methods, the reason of omitted passages or anything concerning the document layout, he has the opportunity to ask the appropriate questions and discuss his problems with people who dealt with the file before him.

2 NCSA Mosaic is an Internet information browser and World Wide Web client, which is available on different computer plateform. NCSA Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. This program can be used as a simple interface builder in the case where small modules are being develop as it is the case in corpus management.

What we intend to do first is associate a header to each text, always keeping in mind that common parts of text headers may be gathered in a corpus header in the long run. We use a home-made program running under Mosaic to create an interface allowing us to display our header and change anything we want in it.

This tool seems to work fine but is still being tested and improved. Thus, if we decide to change the way of slicing our text, we will inform any other user about it by changing the content of the element reporting about this kind of changes, that is <encodingDesc>.

Character Encoding

Dealing with character encoding in the context of a multisite, multilingual corpus leads to several problems which are difficult to tackle within one single framework. The problem has been considered in the TEI guidelines since one of the goals of TEI is to facilitate extensive interchange of textual data.

Leaving aside the problem of keyboard encoding, which is usually kept transparent for most users, we can distinguish three main steps in the life of a character within a given piece of textual data 3 : it is first scanned or typed in at a given site, added to the general corpus and finally visualized for the specific purposes of the project. SGML provides a general way of encoding characters in a text on the basis of a 7-bit ascii code (ISO 646). The corresponding character set includes all graphical characters and special characters together with the tabulation (\t) and carriage return (\n) characters. Any character belonging to this set will appear unchanged in the corpus. On the contrary, language specific characters have to be encoded specifically by means of a SGML entity started by an '&' and ended by an ';'. For example, 'é' will be encoded as é. Two characters are reserved for marking purpose, '<' and '&' which have to appear respectively as &inf; and & if not used for encoding purposes. This means that the different sites where the text of our corpus are acquired should not think of doing home made SGML marking since the corresponding tags would be encoded during the integration process. Since each site may be using a specific character set, it has been necessary for us to collect or build up the corresponding transfer tables to SGML entities4 . These tables can now handle texts coming from PCs (tables 437, 850, 851, elot 928 for Greek), Macintoshs and other platforms using standards such as ISO8859-1 or ISO8859-7 (again for Greek…).

3 At least, the languages we have to deal with in our project are restricted to alphabetical ones. This means that the corresponding alphabets are each based on a limited number of characters which can be encoded by means of a one byte representation, as opposed to languages such as Japanese which requires at least two. The second important aspect in character management is the visualization of a text from its encoded representation. Whereas adopting a uniform scheme for the centralization of a corpus is quite a simple task, it is clear that we are currently far from achieving a general interface which will be able to show any kind of language on any kind of computer platform. However, it is possible to put forward the main issues related to this problem. The first thing to do for any part of a given text to be viewed is to determine the language it is made of. This can be computed through the inheritable lang attribute which has to be kept in memory during any search within a SGML tree. By the way, the TEI guidelines has nicely declared this attribute as a global one which may thus appear together with any SGML tag. The second step should then decode the different entities appearing in the textual segment under consideration by using the proper reverse table depending on the the target computer platform on which it is to be viewed. Finally, one has to find a complete set of fonts for the different platform which may be used for viewing.

Paragraph and Sentence Slicing

There are two main reasons why sentence and paragraph identification is necessary in a multilingual corpus. The first relates to alignment and the second to the user interface.

Alignment needs boundaries within which to work. Depending on the genre of the texts broad divisions are available; chapters in fiction, sections in documentation, sub-headings in newspapers and acts and scenes in plays. Guidelines exist for the markup of these features, but the units are normally still too large for the degree of alignment required for pedagogical purposes. Narrower divisions into paragraphs are common to most texts. However, unlike the grammarians who need to mark every word, the depth of markup required by concordances can stop at sentence level, since such tools are designed to encourage observation and exploration of particular words in a variety of reasonably complete contexts.

The objective of the project is to automate as much of the markup process as is practicable. The majority of texts are being scanned in, and by setting the appropriate parameters, it is possible to produce input text which contains end-of-line indicators only at paragraph boundaries. Word-processed files have this format by default. It is therefore generally possible to replicate the paragraph boundaries for such texts quite easily.

Sentence boundaries offer much more of a challenge. Here we are not simply concerned with '. ? !' as terminators, but their combination with ) " ' or with each other as in ellipsis ... or !!! With the addition of dialogue and differing orthographic conventions, such as the Greek question mark ; or the European quotation marks « » , the identification process needs to be both sensitive and robust. SGML conventions are designed to assist in such difficulties by describing the quotation marks, for instance, rather than reproducing them. So « becomes « standing for left angled quotes as opposed to " which is " and ` which is ‘ left single quote. By applying the SGML codes before attempting to split sentences, some of the problems are removed. SGML codes also exist for marking non-terminating full stops, such as occur in percentages '2.4%' or biblical chapter references John 1.4. The last sentence ends with a pair of numbers both followed by full stops but only one of which ends the sentence. This makes for entertaining programming.

Inevitably some texts impose far more strain on an automatic process than others. Not all texts finish a paragraph with one of the normal sentence terminators. Both the French and English copies of Le Petit Prince have paragraph separation after a colon followed by another paragraph containing the direct speech in inverted commas. Because of the need to preserve the layout, this means that for this text colons followed by a line break are defined as sentence terminators. We have had to set limits on what is and is not acceptable to avoid having mutually exclusive conditions or extensive post-editing. For alignment purposes, as long as the routines are applied consistently across the languages, the shorter sentences sometimes produced are an advantage. This is not so true of the user interface.

We have used the standard SGML codes for paragraphs
 and sentences <s> together with attributes for unique identifiers for both. An example paragraph is shown below.
<s id=p4s1 n=24>This is the first sentence.</s><s id=p4s2 n=73>The second sentence contains a quotation which looks like this &quote;What a strange language&quote;.</s><s id=p4s3 n=36>That's quite enough of this illustration.</s>

The additional attribute of n=24 in the first sentence start tag is the number of orthographic alpha-numeric characters in the sentence. This is included to allow the alignment program to read only the sentence element information to decide whether the sentences are in direct or combined alignment, or are missed out altogether. The items starting with & and finishing with ; are descriptions of the start and end quotes and the apostrophe respectively. This allows the transcription of quotes in Greek to <<>> and in English to " " simply by appropriate translation tables. As this is a strict SGML implementation , all paragraphs and sentences are terminated with
 and </s> respectively.

Text alignment

One of the central point in the process of our project is the alignment of a given text with its different translations. There has been very few works in this domain and one usually refers himself to Gale and Church's (Gale & Church, 91) work where we can find an original application to this problem of an algorithm of synchronization sometime known as Dynamic Time Warping (Fu,82;Miclet,86). As a matter of fact, aligning a text and its translation amounts to finding the better linear match between chunks of texts corresponding to a given level of description, that is sections, paragraphs or sentences. The alignment process is schematized in figure 2 where it may be observed that there is no necessity for a one to one match between sentences for example, but at times two sentences may be translated into one or on the contrary a given sentence can be split into two. It is not our purpose here to describe the algorithm as such but much more to show how the results obtained from it may be used in the TEI framework. In chapter 14 Linking, Segmentation, and Alignment, TEI P3 proposes several different ways to encode such alignments as those produced by our algorithm.

Indeed, considering the different constraints we had chosen to maintain on our corpus, one coherent solution appeared to us. First, we wanted to distinguish in our encoding scheme what would belong to alignment marking from the text itself. We thus rejected to introduce any specific marking such as <seg> or <anchor> tags 5 . Besides, as the different translations are kept within differents files (and thus different SGML documents), it appeared to us that the useful device provided by external pointers would be perfect for our purpose. Finally, to ease the retrieval of any textual part in our corpus we made the assumption that any segmental element would bear an identifier attribute/value pair (<id> tag), thus providing an easy way to build textual segments by means of the <link> tag.

From the different constraints mentioned above, it seemed natural to come to the encoding scheme which is exemplified by the example given in the appendix. This scheme has the following characteristics:

• any information concerning text alignment is exclusively marked within the source text, thus ensuring that it keeps a central point for any further concordancing operation;

• the alignment information appears within the span of the <text> tag but outside the body tag.

Concerning the SGML marks as such, we can distinguish three parts in the encoding scheme. The first one corresponds to external pointers to the target text. For instance, <xptr id=xptr1 doc=target.TEI from='ID(p10s1)'>creates a new id within the source text which corresponds to sentence p10s1 in the target text. The second section of the alignment tags contains possible concatenations of textual elements, when more than one sentence has been aligned by our algorithm for example. These concatanetations may either involve tags from the source text or from the target text since the latter has been made accessible through the external pointer mechanism. Finally, a <linkgroup> puts together the differents pairs of source/target segment associations (e.g. <link targets='p10s1 xptr1'>).

Parallel Concordancing

As mentioned above, for our concordancer we are primarily interested in the behaviour of words in context across different languages. Unlike KWIC (Key Word in Context) concordancers, which show the search word centralised in a single line of text, the preferred format for a multilingual display is the sentence. This is mainly because although the context word is known in the search language, there is no way of knowing where in the target language paragraph the relevant translation word will appear, if indeed it appears at all. As described in the alignment section of this paper, there is the possibility that the required word or words will appear in a preceding or following sentence, rather than the equivalent single sentence of the search language. The identification of shorter sentences by the automatic method may lead to the selection of samples which are artificially brief and therefore insufficiently informative. Partly to cover this problem an intermediate stage of paragraph display will be available as well as the full text offerred by KWIC concordancers. This is facilitated by the SGML elements and attributes for paragraph and sentence identification. 5 The <seg> tag may be used to put together a given segment of a document so that it might be linked with another segment, for example in the target text. The <anchor> tag marks a direct pointing towards another SGML node, with the drawback that the span of the actual alighnment is not explicit.

The identifiers are used in creating a particular concordance. Unlike monolingual concordancers, it is not sufficient simply to find the search word and display it in its immediate context. It is also necessary to find out which in which sentence each instance occurs, look for a cross reference in the alignment table and then find the relevant sentences in the target language. The two languages can then be displayed side by side. In fact, it is proposed to use a KWIC concordance display for the search language. This has the advantage of allowing the user to see the maximum number of examples on screen and sorting them to left or right using monolingual techniques, and to be able to move to the side-by-side presentation from any given line.

Regrettably, the existence of the codes in the text which allows this to happen disrupts the natural method of building concordance lines, as the formatting gets in the way of simple pointer arithmetic within the text file. A linear concordancer has been built which deals with this difficulty, but it is expected that a fully inverted file method will be designed which would simplify line, sentence and paragraph reconstruction considerably. The location ladder built into the TEI document in chapter 14 is being explored as a potential basis for this approach. As the concordancer program is written in C++ the various elements and their attributes can be placed in different objects defining a line, a sentence and a paragraph for simple re-construction or manipulation.

Data retrieval and User interface A toolbox oriented management of the corpus

As shown in figure 3, a given text goes through a whole process of transformations before appearing in a usable form within our corpus. Indeed we can distinguish two main phases in this process, one corresponding to a preprocessing working on raw data and yielding a SGML compatible document and one progressively adding new information to text by simply adding new SGML elements to it or making up existing one. As shown in this paper this second phase makes it possible to consider a whole set of independent modules specialized for a specific type of information and the corresponding treatments.

Even if they can be independently conceived, all those modules share at least two main characteristics.

Towards a user-driven interface

All the preceding corpus management is designed to allow a variety of users access to the texts of the corpus. As has been mentioned, the impetus for the project came from lecturers, and their main specification was for an interactive interface which could be used, at different levels, by student and teacher alike. Neither group must see anything but the plain text, either entry point or at user point.

Accordingly, all coding and decoding is handled by the programs so that there are no distractions in terms of entering on a keyboard, post-editing OCR texts or reading the results on a screen. Likewise, it is intended that the amalgamation of searching and sorting facilities will be handled by the program, allowing the user to enter simply the word or words required.

To allow maximum multilingual flexibility, there is provision for the selection of the working language, the language which will be used for primary searching and the target language. These are not, of course, mutually exclusive. It may be beneficial for the help system to be available in the home language, for instance, but experienced users may prefer to work entirely in the search language.

The degree of selectivity afforded by the TEI header will allow the required selection of subsets to include, for example, only original texts in the designated search or target language, to attempt to ensure that all translations are only one step away from the original.

The interface offers single word, multiple word and context word options to allow synonyms, antonyms, phrasal patterns and the like to be explored. These are standard on monolingual concordancers, but it is here that the sentence id information will be working hardest in collecting the sentence or sentences which go with the occurrence of the search criteria in the the target language. As has been mentioned, the primary screen will probably still be the KWIC concordance line, but from there the user will be able to move into parallel sentences, parallel paragraphs or full screen text in either search or target language.

Again, it is the tree system of TEI/SGML which makes the meeting of this objective across a variety of languages an immediate possibility.

The other main element required by the lecturers is the selection of references for the creation of test materials. It is intended that it will be possible for student users to make use of some of these facilities to create on-screen tests for themselves. The tests provided include a gap-filler, creating a gap where the search word(s) appear in the sentence, Cloze, where complete words are removed at regular intervals which can be specified by the user, and a C-test, where the second half of each word is removed. The facility to restrict the selection to certain of the display items is also needed. Exercises constructed in this way can be saved. Because the corpus is closed, the unique sentence identifiers can be saved also to allow instant access back into the full text from any exercise.

One incidental benefit of the sentence id system is that searching does not have to be restricted to the search language. It makes it possible to specify inclusions or exclusions for the target language to restrict the content of the material offered for examination, which may become more important as the corpus grows. It may be possible to distinguish concessive use of 'while' in English by excluding the target language word(s) which express its temporal use, so saving some editing of the search language.

Although we are still at an early stage in the project, it does appear that the adoption of the TEI standard will allow the users to obtain a good deal of what they want whilst leaving the corpus in a controlled state.

Towards flexible tools and resource

Despite the considerable amount of work implied for anyone who wishes to conform to such guidelines as those produced by the Text Encoding Initiative, it appeared to us that this was definitely worth the effort.

Indeed, as a norm, it makes it possible for a given electronic text to be transferred from one scholar to another without spending hours in defining an interchange format and writing tools for transcription.

Besides, it offers the possibility to incrementally add new information to a given text without any loss of generality. We have seen how natural it was to add alignment information to a text, but in the context of second language teaching, there is always a possibility to add some specific syntactic or rethorical elements on the basis of the different sets of tags defined within the TEI. It is clear however, that such encodings have to be accompanied by a clearly defined set of tools which will effectively give a semantics to the corresponding marks.

  also gives information which is additionally useful for our project. It tells us where the electronic file comes from and who worked on it before it was imported on our local network. It says what kind of encoding has been used and what kind of changes the electronic document had to undergo before release to other site.

  Here below is an example of character encoded text taken from St Exupéry's Le petit prince in French and in Danish. Original texts J'ai donc dû choisir un autre métier et j'ai appris à piloter des avions. J'ai volé un peu partout dans le monde. Et la géographie, c'est exact, m'a beaucoup servi. Je savais reconnaître, du premier coup d'oeil, la Chine de l'Arizona. C'est très utile, si l'on est égaré pendant la nuit. Jeg blev nødt til at vaelge en anden bestilling, og jeg laerte så at flyve flyvemaskiner. Geografien har ganske rigtigt vaeret mig til stor hjaelp. Jeg kunne med et eneste blik kende forskel på Kina og Arizona. Og det er meget praktisk, hvis man er fløjet vild om natten. Encoded version J'ai donc dû choisir un autre métier et j'ai appris à piloter des avions. J'ai volé un peu partout dans le monde. Et la géographie, c'est exact, m'a beaucoup servi. Je savais reconnaître, du premier coup d'oeil, la Chine de l'Arizona. C'est très utile, si l'on est égaré pendant la nuit. Jeg blev nødt til at vælge en anden bestilling, og jeg lærte så at flyve flyvemaskiner. Geografien har ganske rigtigt været mig til stor hjælp. Jeg kunne med et eneste blik kende forskel på Kina og Arizona. Og det er meget praktisk, hvis man er fløjet vild om natten.

  Figure 2

First, they have

  Figure 3.

the TEI now provides Writing System Declarations for most of the usual encoding tables.

This library, first intended to cope with bibliographical data has been developped under the respondsability of Jacques Ducloy (Jacques.Ducloy@loria.fr).

Acknowledgements

The work described in this paper is part of Lingua project n° 93-09/1245/F-VB funded by the European Union.