Linguistic Variety: One Language for Countless Locales

In terms of linguistic variety, the relatively small scope of the study did not enable us to gather much data from non-French francophone players, making it hard to establish a correlation between country of origin or residence and satisfaction with localisation into French.

Still, we believe it is a point worth emphasizing since, as already mentioned when defining localisation (section 2.1.2.1), within the same language (in this case, French) there is a great linguistic variety. Within the localisation area, this variety manifests itself through different locales. For the sake of simplicity, the study has been treating localisation into French as if there was only one French locale, which, in practice, is far from being the case. The questionnaire did not particularly draw participants’ attention on the fact that there may be variations in cultural frameworks (and including in the choice of words) according to the country for which the game was marketed. No participant, not even those with a translation and interpreting background, pointed out this aspect either, which led us to think that most games were localised into a French regarded as “standard”, allegedly understood by all francophone players, probably the locale from France. Yet, these variations exist, some of them are minute and some much more salient, often even within the same country.

For example, one can imagine that the respondent who stated he came from Mauritius and lived in Reunion Island (France) may not exactly speak the same locale as other French people. Indeed, there might be words of Mauritian and/or Reunionese Creole in his daily life and cultural references that would be more suitable for these specific locales.

Considering Belgium and Switzerland, the French spoken there is generally similar to that spoken in France, although the accent is different and some of the words used are regionalisms. For instance, very common words like mobile phone (“(téléphone) portable” in French from France) are different: “GSM” in the Belgian locale and “natel” in the Swiss one.

Another distinction that probably occurs a lot more and may thus be somehow problematic is numbers. Indeed, the Belgians and the Swiss use “septante” and “nonante” when the French use “soixante-dix” and “quatre-vingt-dix”. In Switzerland, some speakers (mostly from the Vaud canton) say “huitante” where the rest of the francophony says “quatre-vingt”. This may be particularly striking in fully localised (i.e. dubbed) games with a strong historical background leading to the presence of numerous dates.

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Therefore, what could appear as a mere trifle may have a slight effect on player immersion since the first way of counting probably would not feel natural to someone from France, unused to it. The reverse may be true as well, although Swiss and Belgian users are completely aware of the variation in France, even if they do not use it.

As mentioned in the data analysis, no respondent came from Quebec. This would have been interesting in order to see if the games they play are tailored to their specific locale or if they only have the option of playing in the French from France locale and, if so, whether it bothers them and has an impact on their immersion. One could say the same with other French locales not represented in our samples, for example players from some African countries. In this case, localisation may become profitable in the short term since the video game market in Africa is still small but is growing rapidly (Chan, 2017), with an increasing number of events in the gaming industry being held on this continent (Sika Latzoo, 2016). Indeed, the revenue of the games industry in Africa is expected to reach 442 million dollars in 2017, according to the analysts from Newzoo (cited in Chan, 2017). On the other hand, the yearly revenue data provided by the same analysts during the second quarter of the 2017 year did not single out Africa but added it up to Europe, totalling 26.2 billion dollars (24% of the global games market), which makes it harder to compare with their previsions (McDonald, 2017). Although the importance of the French-speaking community in Africa (around 55% of the French-speaking population according to the International Organisation of la Francophonie⁴⁷) would yet be another element in favour of more localisation, the issue of which locale to use remains, since Africa hosts a wide variety of peoples with their own specificities. On top of that, the two countries with the biggest markets (South Africa and Nigeria) do not have French but (at least) English as an official language (Chan, 2017). We shall therefore see if a trend emerges in the future.

47 See https://www.francophonie.org/Welcome-to-the-International.html [accessed 04 Sep. 2017].

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In the case of Quebec however, it would make sense that games should be localised in this particular locale. Indeed, the country is a big market as a whole, and, according to the Canada 2016 Census, it counts around 7.2 million native French speakers, which represents just over 20% of the population (the second most spoken language). Some French game development studios are also well-established there, like Ubisoft, based in Montreal.

Furthermore, although the population is very exposed to English and masters it, studies have shown that as a general rule, and contrary to other French speakers from Switzerland, Belgium and Luxembourg for example, Quebec inhabitants have a negative a priori towards English, the dominant language in Canada, and clearly favour francophone cultural products or products which are advertised for in French (Bernal Merino, 2015). On top of this, the predominance of French, notably as the commercial language, was enshrined in the law in 1977 with the Charter of the French language, also known as Bill 101 (Thibault, 2014). However, it was not until 1997 that it included video games, stating explicitly “[a]ll computer software, including game software and operating systems, whether installed or uninstalled, must be available in French unless no French version exists”⁴⁸, which may remind us of the French Toubon law mentioned in 6.1. Yet, until the 2000’s, most games in Quebec were only marketed in English, as a part of the enormous North American market, even after the Charter was passed (Thibault, 2014). A tremendous step has therefore been taken since then, since games are now marketed in French to the Quebec population. Still, it may be beneficial for companies to invest in a more-targeted approach taking into account this specific locale, as advised by the language service company LevelUp on its blog (Damien, 2016). In addition, in the film industry it has become common practice to release movies both in the French from France locale and in the French from Canada one: as early as in 2001, 65% of dubbed movies for release in Quebec were dubbed in this particular locale (BBC, 2001). Coming back to the video game industry, it seems that producers are starting to cater for more locales. Indeed, according to a keynote speech delivered by Jaime Giné in 2009, when he was Vice-President of the International Development Services at Electronic Arts (EA) (cited in Bernal Merino, 2015, p. 188), nowadays, there is a trend towards offering localisations for various linguistic variants, provided the target community is big enough to make the investment profitable. These variants are often Canadian French, Brazilian Portuguese and Latin-American Spanish and, according to the same source, they may be available together with their European counterparts or sometimes instead of them, which shows the increasing refining of marketing strategies, to which localisation belongs.

48 The updated English version of the law is available at: http://www.legisquebec.gouv.qc.ca/en/showdoc/cs/C-11 [accessed 04 Sep. 2017]. The quoted sentence was taken from article 52.1.

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A different way to cater for linguistic variety in the industry is the use of various dialects.

This is a common game localisation technique, which belongs to what Molina and Hurtado coined “linguistic variation” (2002, p. 511). In practical terms, it consists in “the introduction in the target text of dialects [or accents] absent in the original for characterisation purposes”

(Mangiron and O’Hagan, 2006:5). This technique can also aim at enhancing humour, which is why it is often used in plays as well. Yet, as it remains controversial in translation studies, it is usually used parsimoniously only in certain translation genres like theatre plays, children’s literature, comics, animated movies and video games. Still, all accents might not be represented equally, or even not represented at all, which may make players feel like the game was not tailored specifically for them.

To sum up, given the fact that, apart from words, expressions and accents, there are countless differences between all French locales (even currency, since the use of euros may disconcert someone from Switzerland), one may challenge the idea of a one-size-fits-all localisation. Thus, minute changes may need to be operated in order to make players from

non-“standard” Francophonie feel completely “at home” in the game, paving the way for what McKearney coined “deep” or “enhanced” localisation (2007), a concept we defined when going through the history of video game localisation (section 2.2.1). Such reflections would of course be better supported if other similar studies inquired further into this very specific, yet crucial, issue. On top of the one-locale-to-rule-them-all potential issue, our study shed light on other crucial aspects of the practice of localising games into French, including the poor quality of French translations and dubbings in the industry, according to participants.