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?
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.
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.
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
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?
