I need to title a file that’s in Canadian French, to indicate the language. Français Canadien? Français Québécois? I know there is no actual “standard” Canadian French, but the audience is all francophone Canadians, though was translated* and will be published out of Montreal.
I didn’t know if there was “politics” involved in the official language name, so I’d rather hear is from a native than roll my dice with google. I don’t want to offend with the wrong title.
Thanks!
*Translator’s offline for the night, and this is the last thing on my list before I can finish this thing
Are you trying to be funny or snarky about naming it with a reference to Canadian French? If not I wouldn’t even think about naming it anything but simply “Français.”
There might otherwise be some implied political reason for describing it as either Canadien or Québécois.
Of course I’m an anglophone, what the hell do I know. It depends on your audience. Up here, we either just click on the “English” or the “Français” button.
That we do (US English and UK English is how it would be titled). We also separate Iberian and Latin American Spanish (and more and more US Spanish as well), Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, etc. Swiss German and German, French, Belgian French, and Canadian French. etc.
All languages would be listed together on one page. In this case it’s only French I have two flavors of.
Typically (I am speaking from my experience as a US computer user who installs French versions of software whenever possible) spell checkers will give you one French option (as opposed to UK English vs. English). So I’m not sure how relevant it would be to differentiate between different types of French.
On the other hand, global options (look in the Systems Preferences or Control Panel on your PC) will differentiate between two French-speaking countries, I assume mostly because they want to display the currency symbol differently based on the country.
Also, web browsers usually have an option to choose the preferred language for displaying a webpage - the choices for setting your preferred language always include (in my experience) a generic option (French) and then more specific options (French/France or French/Switzerland or French/Canada or French/Belgium or French/Luxembourg or French/Monaco - strangely enough no African countries listed).
All this to say that in the software programs I see, it’s usually presented as Language/Country. So I would use Français/Canada.
That seems to be the convention most often used in the computer world.
I’d use “Français (Canada)” as well, or with a slash or whatever formatting you want. I’m not sure what this document is, but presumably it is available to a market outside of Québec too, in which case the Albertan, Ontarian, New Brunswickian (?!?) and other French populations of Canada might be a little annoyed. The whole “they haven’t separated yet” issue.
BTW you might want to send an IM to SDMB member matt_mcl, he lives in Quebec and seems interested in languages.
I went to French wikipedia to see what they had listed, and found this Liste de langues par ordre alphabétique
[ul][li]français[/li][li]français cajun[/li][li]français de Belgique[/li][li]français de Suisse[/li][li]français québécois[/ul][/li]
Nevertheless, I would still think that Français/Canada is the way to present it.
Thank you! The original memo I got was that the language contained in the document was Quebec French, but I had a hunch that that might not play so well as it’s supposed to be for all of French speaking Canada. But “Canadian French” is not actually a specific language.
Arnold Winkelried, we usually separate the languages for marketing items, and anything very informal and/or slang laden. This particular client is very fond of casual, hip language. (I’ve also noticed few African languages/dialets/version of euro languages. Mostly I think it’s about wealth of the populace and technology penetration making localization worthwile. The only languages we usually have requests for for Africa are Swahili, Afrikaans, and Arabic). Even without the slang, if the non-european version is translated first (this happens most often with Latin American/US Spanish and Canadian French), we usually have to do a separate European version. Us former colonials are used to reading the “standard” European versions of the language, but our North & South American versions of the language looks “not quite right” to readers in France/Spain.
Français (Canada) is all right. There are differences between the French spoken in Quebec and other French dialects of Canada (especially Acadian French), but in all likelihood it won’t matter here.
Arnold, I believe mnemosyne is anglophone, but she’s certainly bilingual.
I seem to remember seeing software with separate French dictionaries for the different dialects, but I don’t have a spell checker on this computer so I can’t check. There are lexicographic differences between the different dialects of French, but very few spelling differences. The only spelling difference between Quebec and France French I can think about right now is with the equivalent of “gay”, borrowed from English and meaning “homosexual”. The word has a cognate in French (“gai”), and in Quebec French “gai” now means homosexual, while France French borrowed “gay” and kept “gai” with the meaning of “joyous”.
If you’re doing slang or casual language, I suspect the differences will be greater between Quebec French, other varieties of Canadian French, and French from outside Canada, than in the standard language. Think of the differences between UK slang, US slang, Aussie slang, and Canadian slang.
Sure, but that’s usually controlled by a third setting. For PC operating systems (at least Windows and Macintosh OS X), there are three things you can change:
The language in which system menus appear (and also the menus for any program that is written to support menus in different languages)
The default format for numbers, dates, currency (for programs that format numbers, such as spreadsheet programs, and programs that display dates, such as the dates displayed in the operating system or calendar programs)
The keyboard layout
In my case, my keyboard is a US keyboard, so I leave 3 to “US”, change 1 to French, change 2 to Swiss French.
According to Wikipedia, 34.1% of Miami’s residents are of Cuban ethnic origin, while 70.5% of Montrealers are francophone (as defined by the language they most often speak at home). So if you take a random Montrealer (especially one that speaks French well), the chance of them being francophone is twice that of a random Miamian being Cuban-American.
I grew up speaking both languages at home, but went through the English school system (in Lennoxville, before Sherbrooke ate it!); primarily because my mom, as a teacher, taught there and wanted us kids to have the same holidays/planning days! Had she been hired by the French school board, we would have gone to French school.
As it is, my written French is typically grammatically incorrect but fairly clear and understandable, my spoken French is pretty good, and I have no trouble whatsoever with reading. I spent 6 years in Ontario (and 3 in Germany when I was younger!) so I seem to have lost a lot of vocabulary, but I was amazed at how much came back in a short year of working 100% in French at my previous job. I speak English with my husband, French with my in-laws, and Frenglish with my family!
I guess that puts me in the French-speaking, anglophone camp, but I’d rather think of myself as bilingual.
