La Force? Je ne comprends pas!

Last night I was visiting NavLab, a newly opened hackerspace in Antibes. Now before I start this post I would just like to point out that this was utterly awesome!

One of the major problems me and my partner have had with living in Antibes is in dealing with public transport which only runs during the day. Being a small coastal town we often have to travel to do the things we want. However services stop around the 9-10 pm mark and so we have to back in Antibes before then which often feels like being under curfew. So its nice to have a space we’re both interested in visiting right on our doorstep.

Anyways last night it was board game night and I brought over my party piece the Star Wars Force Trainer. This little toy has served me well these past several years as both a fun bit of entertainment and a tool for explaining what I do (show and tell is so much easier). During conversation I found out that the Force Trainer isn’t technically available in France.  Apparently their is a language protection law that dictates commercial products must be advertised in French and therefore any non-French product must be provided with an appropriate translation. So what is Le Francais for The Force? Search me, but I find it very amusing that the product couldn’t be sold here because their is no appropriate translation. From a quick search around the web it appears the law in question is the Toubon law which conveniently has allowances for the Star Wars movies along with other non-French movies. Thankfully this exception exists otherwise I wouldn’t be seeing Guardians of the Galaxy tomorrow which will no doubt have a plethora of words that can’t be translated into French.

* A taxi from Nice is 70 Euros and Cannes 50 Euros which isn’t cheap (in Liverpool the Nice route would cost 20 Euros).

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.