French Labels

[Toucan]

I just started collecting Colecovision games and noticed that for the Canadian releases, they included a label of the of the game in French that could be placed over the English label on the cartridge. My question is what purpose did that serve? It seems that the title for most games was the same (Smurf I know was different on the French label) and the only things changed were "Presents" to "Presente" and "For Colecovision & Adam" to "Pour Colecovision & Adam", along with the copyright info. I guess my question is why would Coleco bother include stick-on French labels when the only thing most people would read would be the name of the game and the word "Colecovision" to know the system it was for. Was this a Canadian requirement? I figured most people did not read the copyright info anyways, so really "Pour" and/or "Presente" is the only real change that one would actually read. Boxes and manuals I can understand, but the game label seems trivial since there's not much info on the label outside of the game title.

Edited January 3, 2016 by Toucan

[Pixelboy]

You have to understand the language politics within Canada, and the history behind it. The canadian branch of Coleco was based in Montreal, and Quebec is a French-speaking province while all the other provinces of Canada have English-speaking majorities. Resisting English assimilation was a big deal in Quebec back in the early eighties (it still is today, but not as much as it was back then) and so for Coleco Canada, providing French-only labels made perfect sense in that specific context. It was a relatively easy way to cater to a specific demographic that was being overlooked by other companies like Atari.