Board game retailers in Quebec are getting ready to form a united front so that the Office québécoise de la langue française (OQLF) recognizes board games as cultural products in their own right.
Such recognition would authorize merchants to sell board games in their English version without incurring the wrath of the OQLF. Currently, the charter includes books, magazines, records and films in its list of cultural products, as well as greeting cards, diaries and even calendars.
Board games, they are absent subscribers. An exclusion contested by several retailers, in particular by L’Imaginaire, which displays several thousand different games on its shelves.
“We sell a package of comic books only in English or manga for which there is no translation and that poses no problem for the Office. When we get to the games, however, she asks us to sell products in French. »
Last March, the OQLF visited L’Imaginaire, a company with more than 50 employees, to ensure its compliance with the charter and to support it in developing a francization program. The inspector noted several breaches of the charter.
“We saw that games were offered in English without the French version being available. It is not in conformity, ”wrote in particular the inspector in an email consulted by Le Devoir.
The director of operations of L’Imaginaire, Anthony Doyon, explains that in many cases, board games simply do not exist in French version. “A game comes out first in English and if the sales are good and there is some enthusiasm, someone will buy the rights and decide to translate it into French. This translation, underlines Mr. Doyon, can be delayed for two or three years.
The charter also requires that a game in French never be sold for more than its English version. Often, Anthony Doyon explains, translation costs, smaller-scale production and rights acquisition costs increase the price of games in French, sometimes by tens of dollars.
“We would have to sell at a loss or raise the prices of our English games to comply with the law. This last option is not one, unless we want to push our customers into the arms of our competitors so that they go and spend their money elsewhere than in Quebec,” laments the director of L’Imaginaire.
“There is no solution and we find ourselves in a dead end,” he continues. Either I don’t sell the game in English and my customers will get it on Amazon or in Ontario, or I translate it, which is still impossible because I don’t own the rights, or I continue to sell it and I’m out. the law. »
He chooses the third path, that of becoming an offender. “We do not intend to comply,” said Mr. Doyon. We will fight and try to band together with other merchants and suppliers to make our point in a letter to the Deputy Minister. »
The game, he hopes, will be worth the effort. “The penalty, if we deviate from the OQLF rule, is that we will no longer be entitled to any subsidy from the government. Subsidies saved us a bit during the pandemic: losing them is definitely worrying us. »
He nevertheless believes that Quebec should stop considering games as mere toys. “For me, that is the problem. A board game is a cultural product: there are artists hired to illustrate them, the scenarios often demonstrate historical research, there is a whole lot of work to create a universe, believes Anthony Doyon. It’s not a consumer good like a toy: there really is a great work of artistry behind a game.”
At L’Imaginaire, between 35 and 40% of the games offered are only in English. “They represent about 15% of our sales,” says Mr. Doyon. We are not against the protection of French, quite the contrary. I think the OQLF should attack the biggest player before attacking us. Not to name it, Amazon has the same problem as us and it too sells games only in English. Yet whenever he opens a warehouse here, the subsidies never fail. »