C.R.A.Z.Y., last year’s top-grossing Canadian film and the winner of a whopping 11 Genie Awards, is a French-language film. And now it is playing in France, a country where, I am told, they speak French rather fluently. But, as the IMDB’s trivia page puts it:
Even though the movie’s dialogue was in French, for the theatrical release in France, subtitles were added for viewers who cannot understand Québécois French.
Or, to quote a message I got from an e-pal yesterday:
The Quebec film “Crazy” is a hit in France, but only since subtitles were added. Like other Quebec films before it, it left French audiences more puzzled than entertained until the French subtitles were added, including translations of Quebec phrases into their French equivalents.
How often has this happened with English-language films, I wonder? Not counting scenes where tape recordings or similarly distorted audio tracks are transcribed in the subtitles, that is.
I do recall that The Acid House (1998) had English subtitles when I saw it, even though the dialogue was ostensibly in English, because the Scottish characters spoke in a very thick dialect (“wee bairn” became “little baby”, etc.). And just the other day, as my wife watched Murderball (2005) on DVD, I noticed that a woman in one scene was subtitled, even though she was speaking English, apparently because her drawl of an accent was so heavy.
On a related note, see also this article from Saturday Night magazine by Jonathan Kay on the differences between Québécois French and European French translations of The Simpsons.
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