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ISO French Canadian beta (excerpts only)

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Harlequin

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Heya,

Kind of a long shot but looking for someone who could read over portions of a MS for a character who is French Canadian, and occasionally drops from American English into Québécois.

Someone recently pointed out to me that it's not the same as Metropolitan/European French >.> I'm not any kind of familiar with the differences between the two dialects. I mean, it's probably not a huge deal, he's not a MC, but otoh why piss potential readers off if you can easily avoid it ;-)

You don't have to read the full ms by any means (though I wouldn't stop you!) but I'm more than happy to just put all the dialogue sections in question into a document. I don't think there's that much of it, maybe two or three pages' worth across a whole MS?



Happy to read something in return, if your MS is literary or SFF genres. (Yes, I'm happy to read a full MS in exchange for someone else reading excerpts of this one ;P.) It would have to wait until May, though, as I can't return the favour until other reads are out of the way.
 
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VeryBigBeard

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I can't help you as my French is not good enough, but I can confirm there are some colloquial differences between Quebec French and Parisian French.

I'd recommend the movie Bon Cop, Bad Cop as "research" (and fun), if you're not already familiar with it.

You might also be able to confirm some of the colloqualisms there, too.
 

newauth

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The good thing is the differences are not that many. You can easily find a big list of Quebec-specific words on any search engine. Alternatively, you can go to the forums on something like WordReference to run it by human translators there.

Alternatively alternatively, if your MC is not from Quebec (i.e., is from elsewhere in Canada), then it really doesn't matter. You can use Quebec-specific, France-specific, or French colony-specific words. Mix them all in and I'm fairly certain it'd be fine.
 
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Harlequin

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Thanks both :)

I did end up getting a couple Quebecois readers in the end (though from a different forum). Mostly I was okay, the main thing to change was swearing.

Never heard of sacres till now! It's a small thing that's a big help to the whole feel.
 
VeryBigBeard

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But it's the swearing that's important, see.

Just for reference.

"Et vous pouvez conjugee aussi!"

Outside of Quebec, Canadian high school students are actually taught Parisian French. I'm not entirely sure why this is, but that's what I learned, despite having an Acadian French speaker as a teacher.

Acadian French and Quebecois French have somewhat different swearing, is the main difference.

As newauth says, there's a lot of cross-over so most people who are fluent end up using a mix.
 
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