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Originally Posted by SignalHillHiker
You could start a blog and turn it into a profitable comedy book based on French translations here. The federal things are as good as anywhere else in Canada, because they're made elsewhere and sent here (like that Crow's Nest sign) - but anything provincial - wow.
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I find the French labels and signs in BC markedly worse than what I'm used to seeing in the Maritimes or Ontario. I'd estimate that 20% of what I see are correct, 50% are not quite right but easily figured out (knowing some English), and 30% are complete gibberish. A lot of Asian products here have complete gibberish French labelling (e.g. implicit misinterpretation of the English word when finding a French analogue) that is much worse than the English labelling.
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It's enough that even I notice errors - and my French is not great. I can hear the difference in accents (I find that drawn-out nasal thing in Quebec really striking, for example. Say, when a Quebecois says cultur. It's like Spanish corazon, THON, gross, versus basically any other Spanish-speaking country's corazon, which is nice lol).
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Do you mean the lisp-like sound? That is a common part of a French Canadian accent, and to my knowledge it's much less common in France. It is an extra "s" sound, not a "th" sound (there is no "th" sound in French).
It shows up here for example:
https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/petit
France: pə.ti
Canada: pə.t͡si
I say it the Canadian way and didn't notice it it until reading about the difference. To me, the French recording sounds accented but to somebody in France the Canadian version would sound like an accent.
Nasal sounds are sounds like -on or -an and tend to stick out for English speakers (the "hon hon hon" laugh). The sounds can change a bit depending on the accent but they're common to the language as a whole and any French accent.
Another funny thing is how English speakers think everything in French needs to have "le" in front of it. I don't know where this came from. You wouldn't have a sign in English or French that says "the stop" or whatever.
Here's the Spanish "th":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanish_coronal_fricatives. I thought of it as a Catalan thing, but it is more widespread than that.