Through the years I’ve noticed that quite a few Hollywood films play fast and loose with any other language than English.
I was watching Oppenheimer yesterday and the titular character was supposed to be speaking Dutch fluently, but the actual lines spoken were mostly jibberish, and more like German than Dutch. As a native speaker, I found this quite jarring and sloppy. Though I can imagine that to non-native speakers this would probably fly under the radar.
This got me thinking if there were more examples of shoddy translation, weird pronunciation, mishandling of language or dialect that you as a native speakers have noticed when watching movies?
I remember watching Batman Begins, and Christian Bale dropped an awful line in Mandarin but pronounced some words like Cantonese (he butchered “I’m not a criminal” into “I’m not a rice wheel / cloud”). I’m always amazed that how much are the actors getting paid, yet can’t afford to hire a language coach or just some random person from Chinatown to be on set and help them rehearse just one line of sentence that has 5 words in it (我不是犯人)
I’m reminded of this because, I was watching season 2 of Fringe yesterday, in one episode, Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) claimed that he could speak some Cantonese, and he indeed spoke a couple of okay Cantonese lines in that episode, he didn’t sound like native, but it’s believable enough as a character who needed to learn the language to do some shady dealings in the past. The lines were not butchered or sounded exaggerated, and I don’t think Joshua Jackson himself was getting paid in millions while filming Fringe.
It’s even more jarring when Hollywood hires Asian actors to do lines in Asian languages that are not their native languages. I’ve heard this quite often, when they hire a Korean actors to speak Mandarin / Cantonese, and they sounded awful.
Also, in Japanese shows, I have no idea why they kept making the actors who can’t speak English, speak English. In Shin Godzilla, Satomi Ishihara’s character is supposed to be a special envoy for US President (IIRC the character grew up in the US), and her deliveries totally broke the immersion. The funny thing is that the other Japanese native characters who didn’t grew up in the US, delivered more convincing English lines than hers. Japanese directors, you don’t need to speak English to look cool, it’s okay for the characters to speak Japanese in Japan.
Hire a language coach, they have already been hiring dialect coaches for decades, why not hire a language coach for a few days? (of course not, the money needs to get into Zaslav’s pocket)
Also, in Japanese shows, I have no idea why they kept making the actors who can’t speak English, speak English.
This is a common trope in anime, and it kills the immersion. Like, some girl (typically named “Elizabeth” or “Claudia”), who is British, but is now attending a school in Japan due to some foreign exchange program or something, speaks fluent Japanese but super broken English, but everyone is impressed regardless… Or even worse, when they’re supposed to be an English language teacher but still speak very broken English with a thick Japanese accent.
BTW, here’s a pretty cool video everyone in this thread should check out: How English Sounds to Japanese People
I’ve also seen instances where you have a Chinese character with Chinese dialogue played by a native speaking actor, but whoever wrote the dialogue is not a fluent speaker so it sounds like something a 5-year old would say.
Or the flipside of that: the foreigners in “Squid Game” whose English dialogue sounded like it was written by someone who’d taken a couple years of English in high school and never had an adult conversation.
It didn’t help that they cast people who sounded like they’d done a couple plays in high school and never had a paying acting job in the decades since.
I’m only talking about the English speaking actors of course.
Have you watched Warrior? I’m very curious how well the various actors speak their Cantonese (?) lines. The characters are all supposed to be born in China (except for one, who only speaks Cantonese despite being born in America). Most of the dialogue is spoken in English, but we’re shown that they’re actually speaking Cantonese when non-Chinese people are in the scene. So, most of the characters have to speak Cantonese lines at some point, but I think only a couple of them are actually fluent in Cantonese. There are English-Japanese, Canadian-Vietnamese, Indonesian, and some other combinations that are not Chinese.
IIRC I only watch the first 2 episodes, and if memory serves me right, the side characters speak fluent Cantonese, but the main character not so. I can’t remember much.
For all we know, Oppenheimer spoke the same ‘fluent’ Dutch in real life too. People would only see him talk fluent Dutch because they didn’t speak Dutch.
Does anyone actually speak fluent Dutch? Is it even possible to speak fluent Dutch? We may never know
Joost mag het weten.
While it is possible for others who do not speak the language to be sufficiently fooled into believing he spoke it fluently, it would be really weird if a university lecturer would give lectures in a nonexistent language without anyone commenting on it.
It’s Always Sunny did a pretty great use of a character taking some kind of brain enhancing chemical and learning Mandarin almost overnight. In real life, it was all gibberish, but someone fluent in Chinese would probably let it slide because movies/TV never actually get Chinese fluency on screen. And then later on it’s revealed that it actually was gibberish in the show, too, and the Chinese speaking person was just humoring the idiot who thought he was becoming smart.
Swedish used to be misrepresented, but now Swedish actors have become more prominent and they can at least pronounce their native lines correctly. That being said, even a Swedish actor sometimes fails to point out translation errors, which I find amusing.
Also, ostensibly Swedish characters with non-Swedish names is weird. A couple that spring to mind:
- Kurt Hendricks (John Wick)
- Dieter Stark (The Lost World: Jurassic Park)
- Solomon Eddie (Minority Report)
I assume the muppets nailed its Swedish representation?
Probably true for most languages. The one that bugs me is when they hire a Chinese-American actor to speak Mandarin but the actor doesn’t actually speak Mandarin fluently or speaks it with such a thick accent that I stop being able to believe the character is from China.
All the time, and at least for Europe, it seems that the further east you go, the worse it is. I suppose it’s a bit justified since the pronounciation is very difficult for your standard English speaker - especially for slavic languages or languages with slavic influences.
Dutch probably makes sense to be in this category too, with its pronounciation quirks. I’d imagine it would be similar for Danish as well?
It’s a bit unfair to expect actors to learn languages up to the native level in the relatively short time of making a movie. Unless they’re already a speaker of the language, going to almost native levels takes a huge anount of time. It’s also not fair to compare with non-natives speaking English since the exposure to English is quite larger in media people consume than other languages, I think.
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Correctly pronouncing a language to the level that it’s indistinguishable from a native is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) hurdles to learning a new language. It seems easy but I would wager that exclusively germanic-language speaking people are not able to properly pronounce, say, Chernobyl. (If you watched Brooklyn 99, their running joke with Nikolaj is very accurate)
To one’s own ear, filtered through their own perception of the sounds they know and put together to speak the words, it sounds OK. But do try to learn to order a coffee in the local language when you go somewhere and see if they respond in English or not. This may vary between people and their background - say a Swede might pull it off in Norway. But send the Swede to Slovakia and it might be a bit more difficult. Look up the pronounciation for Gulden Draak (spelling?) if you’re not Dutch and have some fun with that.
Edit: this is also why shibboleths are a thing
Gulden Draak (spelling?)
You are correct :)
You have to be able to hear and to reproduce the sounds of the language.
I’m French, and I have an Italian friend. She can’t hear the difference between \u\ and \y\ For her, “dessus” (above) and “dessous” (below) have the same sound.
And I’ve never been able to reproduce the sound \r\ . I can only say \ʁ\ , which ruins any attempt to say something as simple as “ragazza” (girl).
I wonder how hard it is to have the actor attempt to say the words in another language, but then dub over it so at least the mouthing looks right now it visually passes as them saying it themselves with proper pronunciation.
Performers have lipsynced after all on live stage. So extra post edits could help even further with the illusion.
I can’t count the number of movies with a scene in Paris, and the extras with one line of text have a thick american accent.
Terminator 2 - No problemo
I noticed a really weird variant of this while playing one of the RE Revelations games. From what I remember, the game was set on some fictional island that was supposed to previously have been under Russian or Soviet control, and one of the collectables was a coin with some text that was very badly translated and typed in a Japanese font (these usually have Cyrillic support, but the characters are drawn weirdly, like they’re all borrowing from a copy of a copy of some early 20th century book). Then I heard a radio recording in the game, and it was in perfectly-understandable and well-spoken Russian.
So they got a good Russian-speaking voice actor for the game, who presumably could talk to the script-writers and figure out what he was actually supposed to say, but they didn’t have anyone else to run the game’s graphics through.
A very clear example for me is Gustavo Fring from Breaking Bad. The character is supposed to be chilean and lived in Chile for a good portion of his life, yet his spanish is atrocious. Huge contrast with Lalo, whose actor is actually bilingual in spanish and english, and therefore speaks both languages fluently.
I also remember watching a yt clip of Jim Cearrey speaking Korean. I think it was from the Yes movie. My K-drama fanboy self thought he did a good job from the shows ive seen, but actual koreans in the comments were clarifying his accent was kinda weird.
Jim Cearrey in Yes movie isn’t Korean, didn’t live in Korea and learnt it at a rather old age. It makes sense for him to speak with a weird accent in the movie universe.
It’s extremely frustrating to me as a native Russian speaker (just commented about this in another thread), since Hollywood looooves Russian villains but hates hiring Russian actors. I actually could not watch later seasons of Stranger Things because of this. I’ve lived in the US my whole life and am now way more fluent in English than Russian, but chose to watch some episodes in Russian because it was way more bearable.
Yeah it’s pretty weird how a lot of actors are cast to play russians, except people of actual russian background. I wonder why that is, holdover from cold war sentiment? or are there just too few Russian actors in hollywood?
I believe some of it is cold war sentiment, but also, the fact that Russia has remained a political enemy of the US. I also suspect a part of it is that it’s harder to find Russian (or Russian-speaking) actors who would agree to play such dehumanizing roles, but obviously, a lot of actors don’t have the luxury of choosing. A big improvement would be to have actual Russian-speaking consultants involved in casting - which, IMO, would be good for casting any actor for a foreign-language-speaking role. It’s bizarre to me that it’s not already a bare minimum requirement for people to be fluent in the languages they’re speaking.
