Often I will see movies or TV shows where characters are supposed to be speaking German, but the actors are actually speaking English. Quite usually, these actors will be speaking English with German accents.
For example, this happens in Hogan’s Heroes. (There are better examples I’m sure but that’s the one that sticks with me at the mo’.)
My question is: Does this happen in films written in languages other than English?
Like, say there was a French film starring American characters living in New York, but all played by French actors. Will (or could) these actors spend the whole film speaking French, and that with an American accent?
I mean the question to generalize to all languages, not just to French, of course.
Right, so I figure, but the question I meant to focus on* was whether or not the Xian speaking actors would do so with a Ylandic accent.
It’s always struck me as conceptually odd the way we do it in most such movies here in the States. If the characters are speaking Russian, we have the actors speak in English with Russian accents. But if the character’s are speaking Russian as their native language, shouldn’t their speech be marked as “accentless”** rather than as accented?
I mean, this doesn’t annoy me or anything, it’s just always seemed “funny if you think about it” to me, and I was wondering if this is how everyone else does it as well.
-FrL-
*I see now that might not have been perfectly clear from the OP.
**Yes, Linguists, I know there’s not literally such a thing as “accentless” speech but surely you know what I mean by saying “speech that is marked as ‘accentless.’”
I don’t know much about a French version of Hogan’s Heros, but in the film Les Visiteurs there were some hilarious (medieval) English accents at the beginning.
“Lost” is dubbed into French and there would be no way of knowing that Charlie is a Brit, Calire an Ozzie or Sawyer so delectibly southern. They tend to go for a neutral accent when dubbing.
As for actual francophone productions, yes they do sometimes have - for example - Nazi officers speaking to each other in German-accented French.
A while back there was a TV series in Japan called Doku, starring Japanese actor Shingo Katori as a Vietnamese immigrant in Japan working in a restaurant, studying Japanese and falling in love with his language teacher.
He sounded less like “Japanese person speaking with a Vietnamese accent” than “Japanese person with severe brain damage”.
There’s nothing conceptually odd about it – you’re just using the wrong concept.
The point is not to be “accurate.” The point is to indicate that the characters aren’t speaking English. As a convention and for ease of understanding, they do speak English, but do it with an accent to indicate they are Germans (or whatever).
Nowadays, people are used to the subtitles and having the actors speak the language they would normally be speaking, but until around the 70s, subtitles were something Hollywood avoided (a lot of people hated them, and would not go to a foreign language film if subtitled). So they invented a convention: have the characters speak English with an accent. The audience could understand what was going on without subtitles.
It depends how much foreign language is being spoken. I find it tedious to read movies and I don’t particularly need to hear people speaking in their native language. If it’s a short exchange between a couple of Yakuza mobsters, having them speak Japanese with subtitles adds a bit of authenticity and mystery. If the entire movie is about Japanese people speaking Japanese, I’d just assume they speak English and I’ll just pretend it’s Japanese.
I was watching The 13th Warrior the other day. Antonio Banderas is this Arab who falls in with a bunch of Norsemen. Since the audience speaks neither Arab or Norse, Banderas spoke English and the Norsemen spoke Norse. Once Antonio learned their language, then everyone was speaking English.
What I don’t get is why an English accent is the universal foreign accent. Like Jude Law and Rachel Weis in Enemy at the Gates.
I know what you’re saying. I got into an argument with a friend of mine over this once. We were watching aminiseries on the life of Hitler, and the character who played him spoke with an English accent. Frylock is not talking about dubbed shows, but shows that are written in, say French, but where the characters are supposed to be American, and do not have any conversations in French, in the context of the show. As far as the characters know, they’re speaking English all the time. Would characters like that have American-accented French?
I didn’t say anything about accuracy, though, did I? So I’m having trouble seeing how your post engages with mine exactly. I mean, I see how it does engage the post in a general sense, but the specific point you are making is a bit lost since you’ve attributed a concern to me in your post which I do not, in fact, have.
I think both ways of doing things are perfectly fine. One way strikes me as a bit anomolous. The other way would surely strike others as a bit anomolous. (For example, if a movie were made “my way,” someone could easily and validly say about it: “I’m confused, are they supposed to be speaking German or English? German? Then why are they so good at speaking English?” )
Neither way is right or wrong. Everything’s A-OK. And all may chill.
No, but that is your presumed assmption. That is odd that they do this because it is not logically based on the assumptions of the film. But you are using the wrong assumptions as a base – the unspoken belief in being consistent or logical.
This is done with news stories in America too. If there’s a sounbite with an Iraqi or Cuban, you’ll hear a few words and then the dubbed mode will many times have a voice over with an Arabic or Hispanic accent, at least if they’ve had time to produce it properly, for say a show like 60 minutes.
Right now I’m assuming your joking, and I’m assuming that my impression that this phenomenon is due simply to the fact that the translators are native speakers of the language they are translating.
Whenever this conversation comes up, I like to jump in with two notes:
Hunt For Red October: For the first portion of the movie, all the Russian characters speak Russian with English subtitles. Once we’ve firmly established that they’re all speaking Russian (but before the accents can get TOO tedious for those who don’t like them), they switch to speaking English with accents (in the MIDDLE of the guy talking, no less! :D)
Of course, after that, the accents are all over the place, with the Lithuanian Captain Ramses speaking with a soft Scottish accent, the Russian XO speaking like he’s from England, and everyone else with various (mostly Russian sounding) accents.
The other thing I like to bring up is the Battle of Britain. I remember watching that movie on VHS and with the exception of the Russians, nothing is subtitled (we get occasion to hear minor characters talking in French and Polish amongst themselves). The DVD, unfortunately, subtitles EVERYONE, which makes one scene with an RAF pilot translating the French for “the uneducated among us” (his fellow pilots and the audience) just kind of annoying, and another scene (with a group of Polish pilots chattering excitedly about spotting German planes and their British section leader not being able to understand them) lose it’s humor.
Of course, there were one or two characters in the movie who spoke with American accents, but I think they had uniform insignia identifying them as flying for the RCAF (Canadians), which would still leave the implication that they could have been Americans (during the Battle of Britain, some Americans joined the RCAF or the RAF in order to fight the Germans). I didn’t notice that until about the 800th time I’d seen the movie.
In American film-making, option C is quite common. Option B – having foreign characters simply speak with an indeterminate British accent – is also common (depending on the plot, an non-specific East Asian accent may be employed as well). Option D happens once in a while (e.g. Liv Tyler speaking subtitled Elven in Lord of the Rings, Kevin Kline in French Kiss).
Actually, in the first couple decades of sound in American films, it was not uncommon at all for a film to take place in a foreign country with all non-American actors, and not have any of the characters speak any accents (other than their own). Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner takes place in Hungary, and To Be or Not To Be takes place in Poland, but Jimmy Stewart & Carole Lombard don’t speak in accents–they talk like themselves. Marlene Dietrich played Russian and French characters, but always spoke in her own accent. Films from that time weren’t any less adherent to the concept of “storytelling” as they are now, but they didn’t think it was necessary–and it certainly never seemed to bother audiences.
It’s hard to say when the “convention” of using the accent started–you can probably find films from the 30s that did it–but there were plenty of instances where a film populated with American actors playing non-American roles would still talk just like, well, Americans.
OK - I’m gonna come in again here for a minute. French language films are 90% of the time set in francophone countries, ditto Italian films (ie in Italian speaking places) so the question doesn’t really come up at all. They just wouldn’t do an adaption of a foreign writer’s work when there is so much good French language material around (highly doubtful they would get the funding anyway). See my earlier answer for when there are a handful of “foreign” characters in the film, yes they do speak with the ‘correct’ foreign accent.
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