C't'à ton tour, Super Mario!

A modified version of this rant was handed in as an editorial for my journalism class. Translated from the French version. (How ironic.)
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For a few years now, the Office québecois de la langue française has been whining and moaning about how there weren't any video games with French translations by the big three: Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Earlier this year, Nintendo said they would translate their big games of the holiday season in French.

Now that two of these games are out and about, the OLQF isn't pleased. More precisely, they feel insulted, because characters in Super Mario Galaxy and The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass use Quebecer slang. Characters use "moé", "toé", and "icitte" among other words.

Now, is it really that bad? If slang and non-standard English is so bad, why don't we hear the same whining and moaning from the United States, where finding games without slang is like finding a needle in a haystack. Their slang is as much a part of their culture as our slang is a part of ours, whether we like it or not.

Also, the OLQF got 15 000 complaints from consumers about the lack of French video games in the past few years. For 25 years, Mario games have been exclusively available in English in Canada, and now that there's finally a French one, you bitch about it?

French language partisans, would you kindly shut up? You, much like any other person, have probably read classics of Quebec literature. Classics that you adore and you'd recommend to coworkers and friends, classics in which Quebecer slang is used to give a certain personality to a character or to put the reader in a certain ambience. Michel Tremblay's body of work, for example. So why is it so different when a video game does it?

Let's talk about another video game company for a while now: Microsoft. The voice track for one of the biggest game hits of the year, Halo 3, were translated into French. But, unlike Nintendo, gamers can't choose which voice track they want to hear. They have to listen to the French voice track whether they like it or not.

This would be just fine if we lived in a world where everyone spoke uniquely French, but thankfully, we don't. SO why exactly does everybody who buys Halo 3 in Quebec have to play the game in French. Oh sure, you can select your language, but that selection only influences the menus. The voices that tell you what you have to do in the game stay in French, without any subtitle accompaniment.

How exactly are English speakers in Montreal supposed to enjoy Halo 3 now? The only way they can get the English version is to ship it from the US or elsewhere in Canada.

In the past, one could blame the lack of a translation on the fact that the media games were stored on didn't have enough space. But in this world of technology we live in where the discs games are held on have more capacity than the games really need, there is no excuse.

Finally, is the government forgetting that games entirely in English aren't necessarily bad? When games were only in English, those who wanted to play used their own initiative to figure out what the words meant. It might not be the best solution for improving one's English, but it's better than the mediocre English education the not-so-motivated kids in schools today are getting.

But of course, it's not like we could axe French translations. All that wouldd do is destroy Quebec's culture and exterminate the French language, according to them. The same culture they're trying to censor. Go figure.