“Ammène ton costard, on va lui pèter la tronche à ce mec! Ça va lui foutre les glands!”

We have the same issue with movies that are dubbed in French. Most of them, including cartoons, have a strong accent from France, and there are some words that my wife asks me what they are, because they are very specific to France. In the movie/TV industry, there was a powerful lobby to have all translations done in France, not in Quebec. Now that I’m fluent in English, I’ll rather watch a movie in the original English, rather than watching the French dubbing and always feeling as I’m sitting in Paris at a café.

Opera realized that in Quebec, we are trying to have (and retain) our identity, as speaking French, while remaining different from France. I wish there would be more software companies spending more time in localized versions.

Bonne journée !

JF

@pleh
I belittle’ing my own language, thank you.

@Jean-François
I am totally aware that there are some differences in some choice of words in some contexts, but an international French language translation would have done the trick IMHO. Instead of choosing Shopping vs Magasinage, a more neutral Commerces could have been used.

I was a little shocked to see québécois (aka french-canadian) in the list since the quantity of software available in fr-ca is close to nil. So why would Opera be in fr-ca? I’m sure that with more neutral choices, there could have been a compromise.

- ØØ -

In Canada, French is a minority language, and we are trying to defend it and to keep it as French as possible, instead of getting too influenced by English that is all around us (really!). Our French language is closely tied to our culture and identity. Some politicians even made laws around this (google for “loi 101″ and “Quebec”). Some were taking this a bit too far, in my opinion, but this does not change the fact that we have a different French than France. I will not say that it is better or worse, simply different. Ask other European countries who also use French (Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium), and they will tell you. Just inside the Quebec province, there are variations on the spoken French between Montreal, Lac Saint-Jean and Abitibi. And this is normal.

It would have been very easy just to use French from France and duplicate it. But having gone over the entire language source files myself, I can say there were/are several differences that needed to be covered. If you want to voice your opinion, that’s fine ! if you would like to see changes in the translation I provided, please let me know. I’m open for discussions and even debates about wording. We could have fun for days just with that.

If you want to contact me, please do so by email: jf@messier.ca

Merci.

For instance, I’ve heard once in the opera forum that the fr-ca translation was better than the fr one, so i tried, and few seconds later I was back to the fr one.

Canadians are nowadays known for their adaptation of the english word to french, as french prefers to adopt the english originals words. (mostly in the technology, example: the word “chat” is not translated in french but canadians prefer to say “clavardage”, a word mixing the meaning of “keyboard” and “chat”)

Oh, and btw, I got this list from the Opera Mini team — marketing was not involved in this.

Please, don’t hotlink…