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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[–] foxtrots@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Pantoffel@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] foxtrots@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

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.