In foreign works of media, are English speakers purposefully accented?

Cafe Society
1

In Hollywood and American video games, evil foreigners never speak really speak fluent English. They usually talk in some butchered version of their native tongue or else some campy accented version of English that sounds suitably exotic and possibly from their continent.

These movies/games are typically from studios that could easily afford good translators and voice actors, but probably exaggerate the foreignness for dramatic effect. The examples that come to mind are typically Russian/Soviet or Chinese, usually in the role of some silly villains.

Is this trend reversed in foreign movies? How do American villains in Bollywood sound? Or the British in Russian films? Rednecks in Chinese games?

2

A small bump, for what it’s worth, but in anime at least, they typically don’t even try to have characters perform with an accent, for various reasons. There are occasional exceptions, though.

3

I am not sure of the American villains in Bollywood, but there are a number of films set in pre-Independence (1947) British Era. The actors either spoke English or a very heavily accented form of Hindi.

The most interesting thing is that the actor who was very well known for playing pre-Independence Britishers was actually an American who affected a passable English accent. But in reality also spoke wonderfully enunciated Urdu.

4

In Polish movies supposed English-speakers will usually speak English (at least in the more recent productions). On the other hand, Polish-Americans almost always speak Polish with exaggerated American actress. Sometimes to clearly indicate that they’re Polish-American, sometimes as a sign of snobbery.

5

Non-Israelis never speak Hebrew in Israeli movies. Israelis tend to see Hebrew as “our thing”, and it would defeat the suspension of disbelief if foreigners suddenly spoke it without the movie clearly stating why.

6

In Spanish as original language, someone who is, say, “a very-lost English tourist” would have a heavy accent, but if it’s “the English ambassador” he won’t. There will be cases where an accent is part of a character’s background, but that’s more likely to be Spanish dialects/accents than any kind of foreign ones (even if there’s someone who’s, say, an immigrant, he’s more likely to speak one of our dialects with occasional slips from his original language, as it happens in reality, than to have a Heffy Aksent).

Way back when, dubbings might mix speakers from different accents; nowadays a dubbing studio’s “stable” will generally include people with similar accents, so the “dubbed in Spain” version will be in Spaniard and the version from Argentina will be in Argentinian and the one from Mexico in Mexican, all three usually in their “newscaster” version. No attempts at differentiating the characters’ accents: in Spanish, the Nazis, Brits and Americans all speak with the same accent.

7

Something else which may be relevant: in Spanish written stories, accents are normally not spelled out. So, while a story may describe a character as having a heavy accent that the protagonist has problems understanding, the words actually assigned to that character will be spelled out normally 99% of the time. That 1% is a few words being used as shorthand to establish or remind the reader of the speaker’s accent. Someone whose dialect is differentiated by grammar or vocabulary will use the appropriate forms (different forms of “you”, different verbal forms, different diminutives, etc.), but differences in pronunciation are not spelled out.

8

Many years ago I was watching the Spanish film “Belle Epoque” with a multi-national group and it was pointed out to me that one of the characters was meant to be speaking Spanish with a French accent.

9

Yes, the mother’s lover IIRC, but he’s one of those cases where the accent is part of the characterization; his role is “(fake) foreigner” (he’s not really a Frenchman but speaks in a French accent and gets found out at some point, or maybe I’m getting mixed with another movie). Everybody else speaks with the same accent, carefully chosen to avoid placing the location (ISTR the younger guard “slips” in one sentence, again characterization).

10

I think what is found out is that the mother is not as popular a singer as she thinks she is and the Frenchman is spending all his money to allow her to think she’s a success. But it has been a long time since I’ve seen it, so I might be wrong.

11

To add to this – there is a Chinese movie (courtesy of the great Stephen Cho), a comedy, whose title in English is “Kung Fu Hustle” (in Spanish it is “Kung Fu Sion”, a play on words with the Spanish word “confusión”).

As far as I understand it, the different actors in the Chinese original speak Mandarin with noticeable regional accents. So… When they made the Spanish dub, they did the same, taking accents, but relative to Spain.

So, the ones I was able to identify were:

-A particular character who speaks with an accent from the “far west” of China → They had him speak Mexican Spanish.

-Another speaks with an accent from the “far southwest” of China → They had him speak Argentinian Spanish.

-A bunch of characters speak with accent from the south of China → They speak in stereotypical Andalusian Spanish.

-Another character (a farmer woman) speaks with an accent from the Northwest of China → She was dubbed by someone speaking very much like a Galician woman.

-A pair of characters speak with accent from the “far north” of China → They speak with very strong French accents.

-The (arguably) “big bad” speaks with a strong Taiwanese accent → They dubbed him as speaking with a very strong Italian accent.

-The main character is a stereotypical “big city bad boy” → They dubbed him in a way that reminds you of a “chulo madrileño”, from the Spanish capital.

-The main character’s sidekick speaks with a strong east coast accent → They dubbed him with a very VERY strong Catalan accent.

The effect is astonishingly hilarious, because the LAST thing you expect when you watch this movie for the first time is to have a bunch of Chinese actors “speaking” in different Spanish accents. But it works, and it actually reflects (as much as possible) the variety of accents in the original… Only in a rather strange way :slight_smile:

12

Do you have any idea how the book or film Trainspotting was translated or dubbed? Im wondering how the broad Scots working class accent was transfered to the Spanish language.

13

And, of course, doing so is very common in English language stories. One somewhat obscure author who did this a lot was Marietta Holley, who wrote out her stories phonetically in a late 19th century Upstate New York accent sprinkled heavily with folk etymologies and other quaint malapropisms, like referring to honoring our “4 fathers” and eating “I scream”.

14

This is pretty much the way I prefer it in English. Other than a few key words to first establish and then remind you of the accent, I prefer to read normal English.

Trying to understand it otherwise is usually a multistep process that slows down the reading of what usually isn’t all that deep. I have to read the letters, figure out what sound the letters could make (something you normally don’t have to do while reading), project that sound to the accent you know they have, then listen to your mental projection and try to understand the accent to convert it to a normal English word. Sometimes I even actually have to actually say it aloud rather than just do it mentally.

I mean, it’s never something like the quality of Shakespeare where where having to think harder is rewarded by a more profound or enlightened meaning. It’s almost always something very basic that, if I’d actually heard it aloud, I’d have understood it perfectly as something rather mundane.

Such slowdowns break the immersion.

15

Boringly; there was no attempt at making any kind of “accent” translation.

For another media: when nobody thought it might ever get translated, World of Warcraft Spanish-speaking players used to have lots of fun discussing what accents to assign to which races, as in the English original they have different ones. But what eventually happened when it got dubbed is that the job went to “the usual video-voice studios”: everybody has the same accent and the amount of actual voices is a lot smaller than in English (the European version has only two female actresses). It suuuuuucks, damnit, but of course it’s a lot cheaper than selecting actors for individual roles as it’s done for movies or for the original.