English-only games banned in Quebec?

Although I’ve seen some talk about Quebec wanting “more” games in French, I don’t recall seeing that they were actually going to ban English games entirely. Obviously it wouldn’t apply to online stores, so Quebecers could (and do) get their games that way, but if this is true… sucks to be an Anglophone Quebecer. O_o In particular, companies already translate games into French for PAL releases (which usually happen months after the US release) but some PAL games just won’t play on NA consoles, so even French speakers are in deep water.

This was printed on April 1st, so I take everything with a grain of salt since I haven’t identified which article is indeed the April Fools’ joke in the Star this year (there’s always one). Assuming it is true, though it saddens me, it doesn’t surprise me.

How much different are the dialects between the French spoken in France versus Quebec, I wonder? I always wished that more games came here in Spanish (since a fairly high number of Americans speak Spanish), but when they do get here, they’re always Castillian Spanish (Spain dialect, not Mexico). It’s like…I can read it, but it usually goes a lot slower because they have extra verb conjugations we don’t learn and completely different terms of expression.

Its the difference between british and american English and probably similar to the difference between spanish spanish and mexican spanish.

This is an April Fool’s joke. This wouldn’t slide in the current political context, though a vocal minority would like it to. The video game industry is fairly well represented in Montreal also, therefore the government wouldn’t attack one of the province’s better businesses, esp not in a time of recession like this.

Cid: Man, I hope that’s an April Fool’s joke. It makes no sense- in the current economic atmosphere, can ANY nation afford to ban something that it’s obviously selling just because of linguistic preferences?

SG: Hey, I hate Castillian as well. Mostly because people use it to SOUND cool, the way an American may fake a British accent. It makes books harder to read, because they take FOREVER to get to the point. The fact some of the books I had to read in College were printed in Spain was another reason I hated my College years. -_-

Heh! I had no idea, lol. I’m sure, though, that the reason these games are in Castillian is because they’re intended for people who live in Spain. Most people probably don’t know or understand the full extent to which the two dialects are different, or even that there is a difference. So, why would they localize it in Spanish twice? …Or, at least, that’s how I imagine it goes. If they’re aware and don’t care…well, what the fuck. :confused:

I was about to say that Quebec isn’t a nation, it’s a province… then I remembered that Stephen Harper did indeed say that the Quebecois were a nation, whatever the hell that meant.

Anyhoo, given that Quebec actually has a section of the government known as the “language police”, and their previous quibbles with English signs being too large and some dust-ups involving Anglophone schools, I honestly wouldn’t put it past them.

My mother learned to speak Parisian French, and after visiting Montreal has said that it’s much more casual and slang-ish. It’s been a while on both counts though (Paris was about 40 years ago, Montreal 10).

Arrêt
Temps de marteau

Not knowing what context Harper said it in, I imagine he called the Quebecois a nation similar to how, in the States, we might refer to the Iroquois Nation, or the Cherokee Nation, or the Bulldog Nation. Rather than meaning a nation like Canada or the US (more accurately called nation-states) which possesses sovereignty and all that jazz, he probably meant it like a collection of like persons, a kind of more specific, greater ethnic group.

I wonder if Anglophone Quebecois were included in that? And if so, what makes them different from, say, British Columbians?

Once again, not knowing the various little nuances in Canadia, I think the difference between Quebecois and British Columbians would be the Quebecois representation of being culturally different, almost portraying themselves as something akin to a different ethnicity. It might be something like a larger scale version of the Acadians.

I think we should just all agree that Quebec is not a nation within the framework of Canada, nor are any of the other nine provinces. No one gets special privileges. Don’t make me turn this country around

…Apparently, it’s not a joke? Somehow, I doubt the Office quebecois de la langue francaise is big on April Fool’s jokes:

http://www.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/francisation/consommateurs/secteur/jeux_video/jeuxvideo.html

(ironically, there’s no English translation for this on their website)

There was supposedly a campaign to inform the public about this agreement from March 16 to March 31? What, really?..

Wow, and while searching for more information about this, I came across a very funny website for angry French Quebecers who are particularly unhappy about this agreement on French video games because it’s not drastic enough (you know, it’s STILL possible to see English-only games in Quebec if the French version doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world). -_- It really pissed me off. I wish THIS was a joke. I hate this province.

Wow, no one’s bothered reading at what’s on their website or totally needs to learn the language before they make claims about these kinds of things.

What the site says is that as of April 1st 2009, when a French version of a video game becomes available, it must be placed for sale in Quebec.

False alarm. The only thing this does is penalize people who bother translating their games in French because their games will not sell and it penalizes distributors for having to waste space.

That’s not what the Star article said. So perhaps they were under the same misunderstanding, or maybe that particular page on the website doesn’t discuss the full law. The article specifically says that as long as a French version exists, the English version will not be allowed to be sold. So this means that a) any game that has a PAL release will have the NTSC release unavailable, and b) the corollary of a) would be that if the game is on a system where PAL and NTSC are not compatible, that game will simply not be able to be played in Quebec.

Questions include whether the fact that a game is planned for a French release, even if the release would happen half a year late, would mean that the English version couldn’t be sold.

Programming-wise, this probably won’t change much beyond forcing game developpers into taking their french tracks and text strings from the EUR version releases and slapping them in their NA release.

See, it FORBIDS english only releases, but if they have a version with BOTH languages packed in, it’s cool.

I don’t like it much because it WILL cause delays, but what can we do…

The OQLF statement mostly talks about having French packaging and manuals for English games, and offering French versions of the game <i>if they exist</i>. I don’t see anything about English game bans.

Well, they need to have the packaging and manual, they ARE forbidden to be sold without those.

Its been like that for years. Extra fucking wrapping to tear off my boxes. It already causes an approx 2 day delay on the vast majority of releases.

And your Star article is wrong Cid. It happens. They did a shit job. Be a bit more skeptical of what you read. I personally trust the OLF website more than what someone who thinks he understands French thinks the OLF website said, as much as I hate the OLF.

Not vote for leaders who waste time legislating language instead of dealing with actual issues?

vosotros!