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Anyone who has visited these pages before will know my wife suffers from the ailment known as JDOCD and it was therefore inevitable that in her desire to own the entire Depp film catalogue, she would have to acquire a copy of ils se marièrent et eurent beaucoup d’enfants, a French film in which he has a small cameo performance. It arrived in this morning’s post.
Now, here is what got my English blood pressure rising.
It is a region 2 DVD. This means only legally playable in Japan, Europe, South Africa, and the Middle East (including Egypt). Two things to note here: (1) Out of that list, the UK is the only country where English is the national language. (2) The USA is not a region 2 country.
So – Mr Frenchman DVD Maker. I want to know why the subtitle icon on the box denoting English subtitles sits beneath a little picture of the bloody Stars and Stripes?
Well, whoever designed the packaging obviously didn’t bother to learn enough English to spell ‘English’ properly, which personally I find more insulting. I buy products made in the UK that have “Français” and “Deustch” and “Español” language options all the time…
(Oh, and English is not only one of the 11 (!) official languages of South Africa but also increasingly the dominant one, according to Wikipedia. Certainly all the South Africans I’ve met have spoken it pretty well.
(Oh, and while I’m writing afterthoughts in parenthesis, there are plenty of places in the world where it’s legal to play DVDs out-of-region; I’m pretty sure that the UK is one of them, in fact. Some countries consider region-locking an unfair trade block and it’s actually illegal to sell region-lock-respecting hardware… IIRC Australia was famous for this.
…but now I’m just being pedantic.
AGAIN!)
Well – my capacity for foreign language is about on a par with my ability to grasp string theory but I must say that I thought the spelling didn’t quite look right. So as, presumably, a Frenchman created the packaging, I figured I’d trust his grasp of his own language.
And yes – I did know that English is widely spoken in South Africa and is considered one of their ‘official’ languages’ but it would have been irrelevant really and would have spoilt the flow – so I took some harmless license.
No, I think that is the correct spelling in French for ‘English’… but it’s… well, in French.