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Quebec Cracks Down On Translated Videogames
Thanks to VE3D for their story revealing that the Quebec government is cracking down on videogames without complete French-language packaging, meaning that game stores in Quebec are having to return or amend significant portions of their stock. The article says that "...the likes of Electronic Arts, Sony and Microsoft have been following this law for sometime, but everyone else has ignored it", and a game store worker on the Gaming-Age forums indicates stores "...can't sell anything that doesn't have a French cover", so this new enforcement means that "...the cover that says 'Only on Xbox' must read 'Seulement sur Xbox'."
What the hell were these companies thinking foisting their illegible wares on the poor consumers of Quebec. Can you imagine the uproar if Sony refused to translate their Japanese game covers into English for we here in America? How would we know what to buy? Take THAT corporate scumbags.
if the games aren't on the shelf obviously they wont sell.
this will force more company to actually complete the localization process. a good move as far as i'm concerned.
It makes me wonder what the reasons behind this are.
Quebec is the only French speaking state or province in North America. The 5 million French speakers in Quebec are surrounded by 300+ million English speakers in Canada and the US. People in Quebec worry that French will disappear in a generation, making Quebec just another English speaking part of North America and losing (or at least muting) a distict culture. So they pass laws encouraging the use of French (the law in question here applies to much more than video game sales). Personally, I think their fears of being assimilated are understandable.
If it is in the companies best interest, it should be the company that does it to protect their interests. If it does not effect the companies bottom line, why should they be forced to do it? The government should not enforce it, free markets should.
However, I am not from Canada, so I really have no say in such a matter.
I'm not going to defend the status quo in Quebec or the shaky relationship they have with the rest of Canada. Those struggles are up to the the Canadians to figure out.
HOWEVER, I will defend the right of the Quebecois government to uphold their laws and the laws of Canada. Those laws were put in place for a reason, a legitimate reason, and, being an American who lives in Detroit and travels to Canada (including Montreal) quite frequently, I think it is an imperfect, but workable, solution to the social and cultural issues Canada faces.
As for the software publishers:
Everyone else can translate their packages for the Canadian market. You can, too. It just isn't that hard of an undertaking. My suggestion is that the publishers take a hint from many of the DVDs sold in Canada: use reversible cover inserts in the keep cases. One side is Canadian English, one is Quebecois French.
Well, the thing is moving to France isn't an option.
Not simply in the sense that uprooting yourself and moving to a different country is a difficult, and in some senses risky, proposition. Rather, French as spoken in Canada, and French as spoken in France are such different 'dialects' that they border on speaking different languages...
At least, that's what my obsessed with linguistics, raised on the Canadian border, lived a few years in France fiance says on the matter... And given that she speaks both Quebecois French, and actual French, I'd say she's probably right.
You know, if Sony et al. decided not to translate their game covers to English for U.S. release, you know what would happen? No one would buy them. Thus any respectable profit-driven company would quickly recify the situation.
Bingo, problem solved -- without adding more bureaucracy to the system. "Take THAT" indeed.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Not that I agree entirely with it, but the law in question was actually designed originally to "protect the french languange in Quebec" seeing as the province is in a (mostly) english-speaking country. It came at the time in a response to the problem for the french-speaking population to actually understand the signage in its environment, since much of the companies/etc. were run primarily by the english-speaking. However, this did not have entirely the desired effect (of course, this depends on perspectives) since the result was mass exodus from Montreal to Toronto as far as company headquarters were concerned. Anywayz, the issue always was a bit of a touchy issue for the province.
"When a ball dreams, it dreams it's a frisbee"
French is not spoken only in Quebec. They can do one translation for all francophones countries (population > 7.5 millions).
Where the hell did you see people in France don't like people from Quebec? This is news for me!
this is about people trying to protect their linguistic heritage, surrounded as they are by 300 million anglophones.
No, it's about a small number of people trying to force a large number of them to isolate themselves from the rest of the world's languages.
If the majority of Quebec's population wanted to speak pure French and nothing else, the government wouldn't have to do silly things like this, because English-labelled products wouldn't sell.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
It's a strange attitude for a country that colonized a good tenth of the world, with a language that's spoken around the globe even today. They're one of the big five, and even if France and Quebec were bombed off the face of the Earth right now, students would still be learning French a thousand years from now to read 18th and 19th century literature.