Entertainment

4594 readers

1 users here now

Movies, television and Broadway.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

Anime and Manga

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

(Mis)representation of language in Hollywood movies (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

28 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.