Just saw a French-language commercial for Fido telephones on an English-speaking station. I’m watching a rerun of “According to Jim” on Canada’s CMT. The show is in English, as are the commercials and station IDs/promos, etc.
In spite of the fact that this is Canada, this is a little odd. For the most part, as I understand things, the English and French divisions of our broadcast networks are separate, and never the twain shall meet. But for some reason, something crossed over, and I just saw it.
At any rate, I was pleased (and a little surprised) to find that I understood the language used in the commercial. I guess I can still remember my long-ago French classes. Although, I was also reminded that I can use a refresher. Still, it was kind of fun to follow along and (mostly) understand what was being said.
But it got me to wondering: Quebecois and other French-Canadian Dopers, do you ever find that sometimes, an English-language commercial creeps into your French broadcasts?
I have never heard an English commercial on a French station. I’d assume there’d be a disproportionate amount of bitching about it if it were to happen (and by that, I mean that it would make the news and garner a few editorials about it! :)).
What I do find amusing is that English and French commercials are often exactly the same, down to the clothing, but done by different actors. I’m sure it’s both easier and cheaper to do it that way, but it cracks me up for some reason. I usually end up picking a favourite… the Bell commercial with the teenaged girls drooling over a vampire movie is so much funnier in French. C’est tellement pas juste!
This one was one I’d never seen in English. A man walks into a pawnshop and asks if they have a certain item. They don’t (or maybe they do), but the proprietor offers the man a mechanical flower, that moves when it “hears” music. And he will throw in the latest CD of his daughter–an accordion player. She comes out playing her accordion, the flower dances, and the customer backs away slowly. Needless to say, he chooses a Fido phone so he can call ahead and find out if the shops he is interested in patronizing have what he needs.
Interesting to hear about the “same commercial, different actors” though. Maybe I should watch the French channels more often–if the situations are the same as we see in English, maybe they will help me practice my French.
I’ve never seen that commercial either, but I haven’t been watching much TV lately. Glancing at the Wiki it doesn’t seem like CMT is part of any group that own French broadcast TV stations, but I didn’t look too hard. It seems odd that they would have received the French commercial in order to air it in the first place! Does Alberta have any of it’s own French-language TV stations, or are they all Québec and Ontario based? It occurs to me that this might be some bizarre attempt to market to Franco-Albertans watching English-language TV, but you’d think that would make the news if this was a legislated thing.
The similar commercials could help you improve your French. Often they really are direct translations of one another, with nearly every movement and detail the same except for the actor’s face, though if there’s a joke or punchline that doesn’t translate well, it will be swapped for something that makes more sense. Commercials that are music-based (like Telus ads) might swap the song for another, or develop a parallel French version of the song (or vice-versa, I don’t actually know which comes first!)
I honestly don’t know if Alberta has any French-language TV stations or not. I would suspect “not,” though there might be local news presented in French and inserted into a national French-language newscast broadcast from Quebec or Ontario. We do have a bit of a French presence here in Alberta–there is even a branch of the L’Association canadienne-française de l’Alberta locally, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some form of local French-language programming.
I think what may have happened is that someone in some control room flipped the wrong switch. A search for who-owns-what, who’s-affiliated-with-what, and similar; led me from CMT, through Corus Entertainment, which is controlled by Shaw, which has a piece of Global; while Corus somehow has a few CBC affiliates; and so on and so on. Given the complexity of all the relationships and the technology that undoubtedly connects all of them, I’m surprised that mistakes like this don’t happen more often!
Sometimes I’ll be flipping through channels and come across one of the Spanish ones. Many infomercials are the same ones you’ll see on English stations, except the words on the screen are in Spanish. However, they still have the English-speaking actors, and their voices are simply dubbed into Spanish. The Hydroxycream Veg-o-matic Ab Buster company doesn’t care about its Spanish-speaking audience enough to bother making a commercial that’s actually filmed in Spanish.
I’ve seen this commercial for the first time yesterday, and in English (during Jeopardy! on CBC). I haven’t seen the French version yet. If it’s a new one, then perhaps that’s the explanation: someone sent the wrong file to TV stations.
The cheapest commercials (Slap Chop and other “as seen on TV” gadgets, for example) are usually dubbed into French instead of having a French version filmed. And sometimes the dubbing is pretty awful. There was actually a series of commercials by Réno-Dépôt lampooning this practice. The first ad in the series (and I’d say the most memorable) started as a regular cheap commercial, for a dual chain chainsaw, with terrible French dubbing (you could actually hear the actor speak English under the dub). Then the actor started doing increasingly unbelievable things with his chainsaw, up to and including cutting through a safe. The ad then cut to Réno-Dépôt’s logo, with comedian Normand Brathwaite’s voice saying “si ça existait, on l’aurait” (“if that existed, we’d have it”). An excellent commercial, very funny and very memorable. I don’t think they made an English version of this ad series though, since it wouldn’t make as much sense.
Radio-Canada has a TV affiliate in Edmonton which appears to have a local news room. I’m subscribed to the Vancouver network affiliates, and the Vancouver Radio-Canada news broadcast is an actual show produced locally, so I assume the same to be true in Edmonton. It’s probably not the case with TVA though: the Vancouver TVA broadcast is only the Montreal broadcast time-delayed by three hours, identical down to the weather forecast.
Do you think there’d be more complaints about an English commercial on a French station, or a French commercial on an English station? Because there’s an argument to be made for both.
If I recall, I’ve seen Spanish language commercials on Washington, DC area English language TV. Broadcast radio too, IIRC.
It’s a given here that there are are a lot of Spanish speakers who also speak English and watch or listen to English language media.
Also, I was in downtown DC last weekend and I saw a city bus with a side banner ad that was in Vietnamese (or a language that looks a lot like Vietnamese). The name of the company was in English, though, but the ad copy was in Vietnamese.
I really don’t know. I think it would depend much more on what channel and what show it aired on, rather than simply a case of “wrong language commercial”. During the news vs during a sitcom would get a different level of response, I think. I agree that it would probably happen in either case, but I’m not sure who would complain more. I think the tone/nature of the complaint might be different, with francophones spinning a “disrespect” angle and anglophones going for the “taking our language away” angle. Though I think complaining about a commercial mix-up like this is incredibly stupid anyways, and I wouldn’t really respect either argument!
Personally, I might not even notice a French commercial on an English channel (as in, I’d listen, but it wouldn’t register as “different”) but I think it would seem a little more discordant the other way around, but I know that that’s a side effect of how I process language. I “switch” more fluidly from English to French than from French to English when listening to something. It’s the other way around for speaking.
We’ve been reading French on our cereal boxes forever over here (Alberta) and seeing Stop/Arret signs in the national parks. Is it the same in Quebec?
I have a feeling that it wouldn’t cause as much a stir here as an English language commercial would on a French station in Quebec. But I might just be operating in my own tiny bubble.
I’m pretty sure that there are a few Albertans who would be bothered by a French commercial during an English show; but I’m equally sure there would be only a few, and even fewer would make any sort of formal complaint. And if an error was made, as it obviously was, their complaints would be groundless. A letter of apology would be a nice PR move on the part of the error-maker, but I doubt that anything more would be required.
Non-English commercials aren’t terribly common on our TV, but they aren’t terribly uncommon either–to use a couple of entirely made-up examples, a telephone company might advertise all the places their long-distance service reaches by having people from those places saying a greeting in their native language; or a German automotive engineer might be speaking in German (subtitled in English) about the (to him) surprising quality of an American car. These are fictional examples; but my point is, that a non-English language of any sort coming from the TV isn’t completely out of the ordinary.
I cannot speak for French-language viewers in Quebec, but I’d imagine that the vast majority would have pretty much the same response as I did: “Okay, that was weird.” (Well, the equivalent in French, of course. :)) Yes, a few might be upset, but fewer would complain; and if it was an error, a letter of apology might smooth things over nicely.
Just to be clear on my initial wording…I consider “a disproportionate amount of complaining” to begin somewhere in the vicinity of a single letter of complaint. Thing is, that tends to get people responding to that initial letter with letter of their own, and then things just get silly. People will bitch about anything, though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if such things were to happen. Perhaps letter-writing would begin if the same damn Fido commercial were shown in English on a French channel repeatedly. I don’t know, I was mostly just teasing anyways!
Multi-lingual commercials as described by Spoons also happen in French, btw. That wouldn’t cause any raised eyebrows at all.
Cereal (and other product) boxes here are bilingual (or French-only for the rather rare item made here and only sold here). Stop signs mostly just say “Arrêt”, though there are a few “Arrêt/Stop” holdouts, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find a few “Stop” signs out in the wilderness somewhere, turning [del]feral[/del]ferrous. Oddly enough, I recently spotted a lone “Halak” sign on a private road…they haven’t all migrated to St. Louis yet, I guess!
I tried searching for this commercial on the Web, and for the life of me I cannot find it. I did find a lot of ads for Réno-Dépôt though, including some from the same series. Apparently they were produced in English as well. See this one for the Mirror Paint for example. (I don’t remember if its French version featured the “terrible dub” device, but I can assure you that the terrible acting is intentional. I don’t think it’s as funny as the one I was looking for though.)
Interesting. I don’t know whether I “switch” more easily from French to English or from English to French. That never even occurred to me.
If it’s possible to do so without compromising the lighthearted tone of this thread, can you explain this feeling further? Clearly mnemosyne is right that the motives for the complaints would be different, but in my experience of this country I tend to agree with her guess: some francophones would view it as a respect issue, and some anglophones would view it as an issue of, I would say, forcing French upon them.
From my perusing of Réno-Dépôt commercials, here’s an example. Another advantage of this kind of commercial is that they’re easy to produce in both official languages.
gregorio talked about national parks, where I believe signage is bilingual all across Canada. I do know that it’s this way on federally-funded road infrastructures, such as the Champlain Bridge. As for stop signs, in some parts of Quebec you can find signs in Cree, in Inuktitut, or otherinterestingcombinations.
It may seem to you to be a little odd out here in our national parks. Since we have major provincial highways running through them, the highway signage is in English only, but the park signs are bilingual. So you’ll see a typical green-on-white provincial highway sign saying (for example) “Highway 93 North–Icefields Parkway”; and right near it, a typical yellow-on-brown Parks Canada sign that says “Icefields Parkway” in both English and French.
Our national parks also contain towns, the most famous being Banff. As far as I am aware, Banff is constituted under provincial legislation as regards municipalities, so all its street signs and other traffic signs are in English–thus, it is “Stop” in Banff; as well as “Bear Street” instead of “Rue Bear Street” (as in Ottawa). Apparently, however, as a town in a national park, Banff was once governed from Ottawa, so it may well have had bilingual traffic signs at one time–I don’t know, as I moved out here after Banff decided it wanted to govern itself, and Ottawa finally allowed it to.
And yes, all federal buildings and other pieces of infrastructure are signed in English and French. A visitor to Calgary will notice the “Harry Hays Building/Edifice Harry Hays,” which is a large building downtown; and locally, there is a large federal agricultural research station, where every sign on the grounds is in English and French. Certainly, I’ve noticed bilingual signs on federal buildings (etc.) on my travels in Quebec.
Yes, I can see that–there is only a little bit of French at the end, and most of that is a voiceover/foil that could just as easily be done in English. And in the Asian setting, it didn’t matter what the characters were talking about; the important thing is that one was digging, and found Réno-Dépôt’s giant warehouse. Good example!
Another advantage of this kind of commercial is that they’re easy to produce in both official languages.
