Trivia / Barney's Version

• Acclaimed Flop: The movie received generally positive reviews, but earned only $8.5million in box office revenue against a budget of $30million.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: The French translation is one of the most notorious examples of what can happen when translators in France attempt to translate books by English Canadians into French and then completely ignore what things are actually called in French Canada.[1] Some examples:
  • Major Montreal streets such as "Ste. Catherine Street" and "St. Urban Street" are left in English rather than called rue Sainte-Catherine or rue Saint-Urbain, as any Francophone would call them; but for some reason "Bishop Street" (rue Bishop) becomes rue L'Évêque.
  • A character's desire to catch the news is translated as attraper (physically catch) les news (nobody in Quebec calls it that, it's les nouvelles).
  • Montreal children are described as attending lycée instead of école secondaire (high school), playing in courettes rather than cours (back yards), and climbing over congères instead of bancs de neige (snowbanks). Worse yet, the kids themselves are called gosses, which in Quebec means "testicles."
  • Most notorious of all is the complete mangling of many basic terms in ice hockey, which is a major cultural touchstone for French Quebecers. Jeux is used instead of matchs, a player is given a carton rouge (a soccer term) instead of a penalty, and most disastrously, the revered Maurice Richard's nickname, "The Rocket" (le Rocket), was translated literally as la Fusée!^note The notorious, and possibly even worse, gaffe of referring to the Stanley Cup (la coupe Stanley) as la tasse Stanley ("the Stanley mug"!), happened in a translation of a different book.
• Fake Nationality: In the movie, Paul Giamatti (American), Rosamund Pike (British), Minnie Driver (British) and Dustin Hoffman (American) all play Canadians. Scott Speedman, on the other hand, is a British-Canadian ^note  born in Britain, raised in Canada actor who plays an American.