French Titles

Browsing the local Fnac for some Xmas gift ideas last week, I was struck by how the French feel the need to elaborate on American TV show titles. Some examples:

24 is called "24 Heures Chrono"

House is called "Docteur House"

Lost is called "Lost: Les Disparus"


Alas, the need to elaborate on the title is not limited to TV shows, as a few minutes of browsing on the DVD aisles revealed:

Brokeback Mountain is "Les Secrets de Brokeback Mountain"

The Crucible is "La Chasse aux Sorcieres" (the Witch Hunt)

Flatliners is "L'Experience Interdite" (Forbidden Experiment)


Curiously, Trainspotting was left to be Trainspotting. So not sure if the title changes are purely due to untranslatable idioms or undecipherable (to the French) symbolisms or what.


Of course, there is also the pressing need to change titles altogether. Examples are plentiful in the DVD aisles:

G-Force became "Mission G"

Terms of Endearment became "Tendres Passions" (not sure if that was an appropriate change)

Kiss the Girls became "The Collectionneur"

Steel Magnolia became "Potins de Femmes"

Mean Girls became "Lolita Malgre Moi"


My all time favorite is how the French translated the movie title "Home Alone" (yes, the one featuring Macaulay Caulkin - where is he these days??) - the title here for that is:

"Maman, J'ai Rate l'Avion!"

Literal translation: "Mom, I missed the plane!"

Don't you love it!?

French Spaces

When we were a long-distance couple, I used to find PeeWee's emails exceedingly cute. No capital letters whatsoever and quirky placements of spaces that left me with the impression that he was totally unaccustomed to typing. For example, he would write:

i had great fun hanging out with my friends ,you know them ,at bars tonight. we were so drunk ! you remember jean ?

It was all I could do to suppress all urges to print out the emails and whip out my red pen for correcting his use of spaces around punctuations. I often had the same urge when I got emails from French friends, who, similarly, seemed not to be schooled in this topic.

So imagine the astonishment I felt when Hana came home with a corrected test - she had been tested on writing on keyboards. Her teacher stressed in red that there must be a space before a question mark. I told Hana that this must be wrong. Her standard response to me when I say that these days is "google it, maman"

So I did, and this is what I found.

"Pour les points d'interrogation, d'exclamation et le point-virgule [typographie européenne] : une espace avant et une espace après." - meaning, for question marks, exclamation points and semi-colons, a space before and a space after.

Whoa! Whaddayaknow!? But why???? Do other languagues have different punctuation/space rules too? I know the Spanish put an inverted question mark before the questioning sentence; the French also use commas instead periods for decimals. However I had no idea about the use of spaces; all this time I was attributing that to carelessness or sloppiness. I've been corrected once again!