At a recent job, one of the clients had offices in Canada; therefore, nearly every piece we produced required a Canadian counterpart. Both Canadian English and Canadian French. Canadian English was obviously the lesser of the two evils. I merely had to watch for spellings like “catalogue” and “licence.”

Now Canadian French. Let’s disregard the fact that French in general is a very lengthy language, and thus a nightmare for art directors. Sure, they’re forewarned of the potential for a French version and must take that into consideration when developing layouts. But the reality of squeezing French copy into text boxes formatted for English always turns into a task no matter how much initial thought was given.

And then there was the time when QuarkXpress didn’t play nice with copy that came from a Microsoft Word document. The outcome? All the hyphens and some of the accent marks went bye-bye. Being a language littered with both of these elements, you can imagine the work cut for me. A yucky job, but one that spared us lashings from an already touchy client.