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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."
Wow. Let the French jokes AND Canadian jokes commence!
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.
If the French language is so great, why does it need protection?
because English people are physically incapable of chain smoking, drinking wine, being obnoxiously rude and highly insecure of their culture, all at the same time.
-I only code in BASIC.-
Perhaps it is ridiculous, but not for that reason.
Which game company would stop creating *French* localizations of their games and lose the market in *France* (and any other French-speaking language) in order to get their english version into the Quebec market?
*That* would be ridiculous.
The populations are off by an order of magnitude. The whole point is that a game company may not think it is worth localizing to French *just for Quebec* - but if they localize for French-speaking market, this forces the two versions to play on level fields.
But if they're already localizing in French, why on earth would they kill their other markets just to prioritize this one? If Quebec per se had ever been a priority, they'd have been treating the French version on par with English from the beginning - which is what this rule tries (futilely) to force.
There are a thousand reasons why this legislation may be wrong-headed and is unlikely to have any positive effect - but this is argument is, indeed, ridiculous.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
im a french canadian, and if this law is true it only means i will not be buying any more games in local stores.
french version of games are usually nearly close to unplayable due to being badly translated and even when they're properly translated there is inevitably some key concepts that simply don't exist and have to be adapted.
plain and simple, it detracts from the game. nevermind the lumberjacks that refuse to speak english, i demand my games in their native language.
If this was an april fools day joke, they did a good job of making it subtle. This sort of thing is par for the course for the Quebec government. Mostly with these laws and media ownership/controls Quebec sovereigntists want to create a closed society where people don't feel an affinity with the country of Canada. Which is working over time, as Quebeckers more and more make that claim. I've heard many soverigntist youth make that statement. "Oh I don't feel Canadian I feel I am a Quebecois" or whatever. Well of course you do. Your mind belongs to your society in that way. They're certainly entitled to feel that way, but its intellectually dishonest I believe to manage a society this way, especially when society as a whole is becoming more global, Plus, its all words. The first Canadians were essentially Quebeckers. Quebeckers not associating themselves as Canadians just because of the existence of the rest of Canada is like Canadians not calling themselves North Americans, because American's "ruined the term". And also, theres really no point in trying to stave it off. I mean, Japan today isn't the same as Japan 100 years ago, but they're still a unique culture. Ah well, the best thing for Canada would be if they really did separate. Then we could actually stop giving them money, and appeasing them at every turn. Plus we could get rid of "official bilinguism" which doesn't really accomplish anything but keep qualified individuals from getting jobs. You need to speak English and French to get a government job, but in Quebec English is shunned. It's the hypocrisy of political correctness really. It really is a shame as most Canadians, myself included, generally like Quebec and are happy for them to speak french and be part of the social fabric. But when they bitch and moan over and over, it's just ridiculous.
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.
toutes vos base sont appartiennent à nous
Don't forget staying thin!
To this day nobody knows how they can consume so much smoke, bread and wine and still be some of the thinnest people in the world!
Preferring small portions of expensive food over affordable supersized meals
Okay, I really don't know where to start. Hi, my name is mclc, I am a French canadian and I feel guilty because of where I am born, and because of my native language, which is French, and because my ancestors were conquered in the Plaines d'Abraham. I play mostly in English, by the way. I watch movies in their original language too. Ho yeah, movies are also under this law. And you know what? I can watch movies in English if I want. I have a contact for that. It's a very dangerous black market to be. By law, watching a movie in English is like buying drugs and hiring a hitman, but worse.
As some people said in a few comments, Quebec has a law to claim the right of French speaking people to be served, to work, live, dream and eat in French. Why you ask? BECAUSE YOU ARE 350 MILLIONS OF ENGLISH SPEAKING AMERICANS AND CANADIANS! Is that so hard to understand? Yeah, we lost a war, so what? We are 80% of French canadians in the province of Quebec. English speakers are protected by the federal laws saying that every service must be available in French and in English (this is applied in Quebec, New-Brunswick and Ontario, but mostly in Quebec as there is no other place in the country where you will really get service in both languages).
Now, because you all like separatists scandals, I will disapoint you. It is not forbidden to sell an English game. Understood? Here's the catch that the evil French speaking aliens set up : you will be forbidden to sell the game in English if, and only if the game is made elsewhere in French. This means that if France (by the way, you just cannot get a game in English in France, by law) does not have the game until a few months, we in Quebec will have the English only version until then. When France (and Quebec) finally gets the game in French, well guess what? The two versions will be available! Bilingual like movies, or books, or every service offered by the Government of Quebec (unlike all other province). Thank yooooouuuuu bilingual country! Naturally, a lot of games are now localized, which means have more than one language in the same CD.
Now, what do you do for us, Rest of Canada, except insulting every frog in Quebec? All I hear is the eternal speak white, only said differently (and usually some stuff about the English Canada who won the war). Live in the 21st century, people. Let us, minority in Canada, speak French as we let you, minority in Quebec speak English. We pass great laws that preserve French and does not affect English in any ways. We almost all know a little of English in Quebec, but hey, IT'S NOT OUR NATIVE LANGUAGE. You just cannot think as good in an other language than your own. For example, all this text was great in my head, and now I don't know where I'm going. But hey, just come in Quebec, speak English in any store and you will be gladly served. French people will switch to English automatically, speak an English sounding more like a wookie, but we will try. I think we deserve the same thing. And in our case, we are only 7 millions in a sea of 350 millions. It is for our protection.
Je vous aime quand même.
mclc
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
Firstly, the countries in Europe aren't enclaves -- none of them are completely surrounded by hundreds of miles of English speakers, as Quebec is.
Secondly, they're switching to English anyway. As someone who has lived in Europe for the last six years I can say from my own anecdotal experience that the more the world gets connected, the more people speak English. (I predict that we'll end up in a world not too linguistically different from Firefly)
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
If it wasn't for us, they would be saying, "Nein! Es ist verboten!"
What?
Seriously, are any languages other than English going to be anything more than a curiosity in 100 years?
Wow... Wow. You are so wrong.
Right now, depending on how you define language users, there are over 1 billion English users in the world. Only around 375 million of those are native speakers. The remaining are non-native speakers.
Do you see what that means?
What that means is that people are adopting English as a second language; not using it at home. In fact, a lot of the "outer circle" English-speaking countries (e.g. India, Malaysia, Nigeria, Singapore) principally use English as a lingua franca due to the linguistic complexity of their geographical area. African countries adopt English because it's better for business, and because picking any of the local languages could fan the flames of aeons-old tribal rivalries. The Indian subcontinent just has too many languages and dialects to bother with, so they use English for business.
Nowhere are these people's first languages dying out.
Furthermore, large countries of lingua franca English users, like India, tend to develop their own variety of English, resulting in there not being a single English in the world, but World Englishes, an important concept introduced by the noted Indian linguist Braj Kachru.
A "World English" is a variety of English that is comprehensible and regular within a certain population For example, in Singapore, the verb "reply" is transitive, i.e. people say "I replied his email," with the noun phrase "his email" functioning as the object of the verb "reply." Inner circle English speakers use it only as an intransitive verb, necessitating a prepositional phrase: "I replied to his email." This usage cannot really be considered a mistake, because every user of this variety of English uses this word this way.
Moreover, this idea of "one billion English speakers" really doesn't sit well with me. Pack up your things and take a long holiday sometime. Travel to a lot of different countries, and see how many people you can find who speak English. You'll find a lot more in Europe than elsewhere, but you might be surprised at how many people don't. I live in Japan, and despite English being a compulsory subject in jr. high and high school, finding anyone who speaks more than a couple horribly-pronounced words is pretty difficult. They just don't have an opportunity or need to use it most of the time, and classes are designed to get them to pass entrance tests, not actually speak or use the language (believe me--I've taught at every level of the Japanese education system--from first grade through university).
Then there is the oft-cited statistic about China becoming the biggest English-speaking country in the world. I really have no idea what that is supposed to mean. They, too, have compulsory English education, but backpack around China for a month or so and you can probably count on one hand how many people you ran into who spoke English. Furthermore, China is never, ever, ever going to let Mandarin lapse for English. Never never never. When your country is named "The Central Nation" (i.e. "the center of the world"), you take your language and culture very seriously. Mao's revolution was largely to kick Western influence out of the country (Japan was considered Western--that was not a mistake by any means). However, after taking power, even he could not convince people to abandon the Chinese character system (hanzi) in favor of the Pinyin romanization system. People saw even this literacy-boosting move as a betrayal of their Chinese cultural identity. So there's another English language myth busted, I hope.
Finally, let's look at that term I've been kicking around in this growing reply: Lingua Franca. ...The French language. Now, historically, it's a little more complex than that, but basically, a form of French used to be the trad
And I'm sure your momma burned the cookies at least once - does that suddenly make you claim that ALL cookies are evil? Lots of people have had bad experiences visiting every country, province or state, or city. Irrelevant. Totally irrelevant. Anecdotal evidence isn't data.
Gee, maybe the rest of the world should have a negative view of all Americans because of George Bush. Or all Japanese because of Sony DRM. Or all Germans because of Hitler. Or all Italians because of the Pope's retarded comments on condoms.
If they generalize all Canadians because of it, they have a bigger problem ...
And you haven't had bad experiences with non-frech people? The part of your sentence in parenthesis says otherwise. So, why do you cut others slack, but not the french? Sounds like it's not just "your friend" who has problems with stereotyping people.
Really? Despite the fact that for the majority of its' existence, the Prime Minister of Canada has been a French-Canadian? Are you test-driving Steve Job's RDF?
[citation needed] BTW, why not take a few shots at the Atlantic Provinces while you're at it ... or is it only Quebec that you bash because "they're french."
Check your history. Manitoba and Ontario did the same thing to their french minority. BC did the same thing to their asian minority. There's ignorance everywhere ... but, unlike *certain* other provinces, at no time did Quebec say that the english can't have their own government-funded schools.
All they're asking is that stuff that's sold be available in both languages if possible. Something that any manufacturer, looking out for their own best interests, would want to do anyway, right? This just helps overcome a certain amount of corporate inertia (companies don't necessarily act in their own best long-term financial interest - just look at GM and Chrysler - so sometimes they need a bit of prodding).
And for all the non-canadians looking in ... not all market regulation is "evil." How many other countries haven't had to bail out a single bank? For the record, we've had 2 small bank failures in the last 80 years - and none during the Great Depression. And for most of that time, the Prime Minister was french ...
And for the record, no, I'm not french. I'm 100% english ... but my daughters are both, and that's about as "relevant" as skin colour or anything else; in other words, not at all. This whole thing is not an "english vs. french" thing, despite some old farts wanting to make it look like that. They need to move on. This is not the 20th century any more.