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Quebec Says 'Non' To English-Only Video Games
daveofdoom writes "The French-Canadian government of Quebec is saying 'non' to English-only video games if French versions are available. 'It's causing a lot of consternation among retailers and gamers alike, who fear the rules will lead to delays in video games arriving in the province, and may not accomplish what the law intends, which is to promote and protect the French language.' This is a ridiculous rule, as game companies can simply stop creating French versions of games to bypass the restriction."
Link on page to original article:
http://www.thestar.com/article/611472
Date on original article:
Apr 01, 2009 04:30 AM
Move along, nothing to see.
Most rules about French in Canada are ridiculous. Government officials need to be bilingual regardless of capability of doing a job, for example. Firing a native French speaker from government is almost impossible, regardless of how badly they do at their job. And if people in government has what is deemed an inadequate level of french, the government pays for one-on-one french lessons INSTEAD of for doing your job, and instead of for french classes with other people learning it or instead of for a government billet in a french-speaking area where you can learn the language through immersion. Do you have any idea what that costs that taxpayer? Or how stupid it is?
Protecting cultural heritage is one thing, but this is even worse than political correctness run amuck, because it's groupthink feeding into this mentality that it's bigoted to be against these policies, even when they're ridiculously inefficient.
To make matters worse, I don't believe the requirements are nearly as bilingual in the other direction.
French culture and language was declining rapidly before the introduction of the language laws.
There's an Anglophone upper class in Quebec, and immigrants from non-English countries come in and generally want to learn English. That doesn't bode well for French so laws were introduced to attempt to encourage Francophone Quebequois from becoming Anglophone.
It's worked well enough that Latvia introduced similar laws to try to protect the Latvian language and culture from the massive influence of Russian after the Soviet Union fell apart
There are some answers for you about the demographics here (legislation bit is interesting).
The Charter of the French Language is the law one people usually complain about (particularly when dealing with public signs). So, not a Luddite thing.
First, if the game is scheduled to be released in both English and French, the stores have to wait until the French version is available. Retailers are worried that gamers will turn to imports if they can't get the hot new titles immediately after launch.
Second, this presupposes that there is an equal demand for games in French, to demand for games in English. The language police can be right fucking bastards about enforcing this sort of thing, so retailers are worried about having to buy more stock than they can guarantee moving. Margins are already pretty thin, so that's a definite concern.
In my experience as a game developer for nearly 10 years who has worked for a few companies, I can tell you that every game I've ever worked on has always had at least EFIGS (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish) localization (with a French North American SKU). I really don't see this as being much of an issue for most decent sized game publishers.
The last part of game testing usually involves all sorts of fun localization issues and me winding up wishing every would just speak English after dealing with some weird Czech voice over bug or something. :) The Sims was probably the worst, I believe they did a localization for every language known to man.
I would start speculating on the luddite aspect (or on anything else) as soon, as the information is confirmed by a source more serious than an article dated April 1. I have checked local French language media (La Presse, Le Devoir and Radio-Canada) and found nothing.
I would like to die like my grandfather did - sleeping. And not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
Er, Quebec French and the French spoken in France are separated by about 350 years of linguistic evolution.
In Liberty, Rene
If you had taken the time to read about this specific thing, you'd learn that not only is this old news (this was done in 2007!), but that the CANADIAN association of video game signed this bill.
Also, any computer game has been subject to this exact bill since october 2007. The only difference is that now, console games are also covered.
If you took the time to read the description, you'd have learned that distributor are mandated to offer the french version of a game provided that it already exists somewhere else.
The bill specifies that any reseller can sell the english version as long as they also offer the french version if it exists. I'm a french quebecer and I kept buying english computer games without noticing anything.
The only problem that I heard about caused by this bill so far has been with world of warcraft, for which the french version was originally built for playing on european servers, so you could not play with a friend who bought the english version...
You might find this interesting:
http://www.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/francisation/consommateurs/secteur/jeux_video/jeuxvideo.html
Read it a third time. If a game company comes out with an English version of a game and then a French version later, the retailer can stock the English version while there's no French version, but once the French version comes out, they either have to buy French version copies or take the English version off the shelves.
So it causes headaches, but not the ones you're thinking.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Why can't Americans accept that they couldn't beat the French-Canadians?
FYI the last time they surrendered was something like 1759. They beat George Washington in 1754. They didn't surrender when you tried to force them to join your war of separation in 1775, once again beating Washington and burned down the White House in 1814 when you also tried to invade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Actually, people do mind. My city (Nashville) recently held a special election with the attempt to mandate that our city government only do business (and provide services, with a few exceptions) in English. We minded a great deal and successfully voted the bigoted, short-sighted bill down.
And isn't WE taking "credit" for 1812 kind of like THEY taking credit for the Seven Years/French-Indian/War of the Conquest?
I mean, Canada was no more itself in 1812 than the U.S. was in 1763.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
FYI quite a few Canadians fought in the US Civil War.