this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Entertainment

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(Mis)representation of language in Hollywood movies (beehaw.org)
submitted 1 year ago by Pantoffel@beehaw.org to c/entertainment@beehaw.org
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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?

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[–] koreth@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago

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.