American actors doing a good job voicing languages they don't actually speak

Cafe Society
21

Can you remember the TV series Shogun, based on the book of the same name by James Clavell? The fellow (Damien Thomas) who played the Japanese-speaking Jesuit Priest / translator to the Shogun was remarkably good at Japanese. His language sounded natural, hardly accented. Really impressive. And rare.

On the flip side, I have far more examples of the Japanese language done wrong. 1. They had an asian-American guy play the Zero pilot that got shot down in the movie “The Final Countdown.” His Japanese really missed the mark. 2. Try Sean Connery’s embarrassing attempt to out-Japanese some real Japanese actors in “Rising Sun.” 3. I can’t stand to watch Uma Thurman / Lucy Liu hacking their way through the Japanese language in “Kill Bill.” Argh.

22

Pretty much all the actors in Firefly had to drop in some Chinese once in a while. Since I don’t know any Chinese, I have no idea if it was any good or not.

23

In, “Miracle on 34th St.” (1947), Edmund Gwenn (who, I believe, is a Brit and probably doesn’t count per the OP) speaks Dutch with the little just-adopted girl who might have really been Dutch–Google-fu has failed me–and it sounds pretty natural, although I think I’m hearing some German in there (no idea if German and Dutch are that similar). If Gwenn really speaks Dutch–again, G-f has failed me–then I withdraw this whole posting.

24

I remember hearing all these urban legends that “Actress or Actor X does not speak English and learns and speaks all their lines phonetically. I think in most cases it was total BS (Helen Hunt? ) but there may have been a kernel of truth in the Bela Lugosi one in that he wasn’t fully fluent.

I think it’s more common in music. Those rumors abounded about the Swedish Group ABBA (again, partly true, the women in the group didn’t speak much English early in their careers but the guys were reasonably fluent, and they all picked it up eventually).

In classical music and opera, singers commonly sing in languages that they don’t speak or understand. It’s a job skill. I have seen courses in foreign pronounciation for vocalists offered in college music programs. It’s been awhile and I can’t remember exactly what they called those classes.

25

Nice, didn’t know about that bit (found it on Youtube). Both actors speak recognizable Dutch albeit with a noticeable accent. They get the cadence right as well. The girl also clearly is not a native speaker, but both have done a good job learning their lines. So another example done right.

26

Yes, German and Dutch are very closely related (the English word “Dutch” is actually a corruption of “Deutsch”). Dutch is about halfway between German and English, all of which are Germanic languages.

To my ears, Dutch sounds like German and English mixed together and spoken with a Swedish accent. (The Scandinavian languages are also Germanic.)

The German actor Gert Frobe in Goldfinger had to learn his lines phonetically, but EON still dubbed them in post-production. Apparently his accent was just too thick to understand.

27

Mike Myers in Wayne’s World. Apparently his Cantonese was quite good while still maintaining Wayne’s weird Chicago/Toronto accent.

28

Sorry, I don’t follow your logic here.

29

Allowing for non-english speakers speaking english, Kaho Shimada is the actress/singer who records the role of Eponine in the Complete Symphonic Recording of Les Miserables. She is Japanese and did not speak English, yet she records the role of Eponine (who is the female lead) in English for the ears of English speakers. She does a great job.
Being a professional singer probably has something to to with her success.
Singing words instead of speaking them might have helped too.

30

On the TV show 3rd Rock from the Sun, the aliens were supposed to be able speak any earth language, and John Lithgow always did a great job whenever he spoke Russian or Spanish, so I’m assuming that he did a pretty good job when he spoke other languages too (IIRC, he spoke at least Chinese and Japanese, and read something in some non-Slavic Balkan language). Joseph Gordon-Levitt did a great job too, particularly considering he was a teenager.

Kristen Johnston would usually just have a single line in the foreign language exchanges, and French Stewart might not even have that, so I assume their abilities to learn lines in other languages weren’t as good.

It’s possible Lithgow actually speaks Russian and Spanish, but I’d be surprised; albeit, maybe he’s studied them without achieving fluency. That would explain why Spanish was one of the most oft-spoken languages on the show. Of course, the prominence of Spanish in the US is just as good an explanation.

31

Question 1: Does Creed Bratton speak Mandarin?

Question 2: is he really saying “Do not mix seahorse with alcohol?”

32

Ummm… Round-Eye? Isn’t that a touch racist?

33

Yup. But how do you think that the Chinese refer to Caucasians? And “round eye” is better /politer than the Cantonese gwailo.

34

Or the Mandarin yang guizi (Western devil), which my (Chinese) father would jokingly call my (white) mother (I think his family may have used the term in a non-joking manner).

Round eye he would use when looking for a restaurant in Chinatown - “This one can’t be very good, too many round-eyes in there.”

35

Marvin the Martian has a Chinese father? I’ll de damned, the Chinese space effort is much further advanced than we ever knew.

36

(Huff, huff, huff) Being called “round-eye” makes me VERY angry! (Huff, huff, huff) VERY angry indeed! (Huff, huff, huff)

37

I’d think in a far-future science fiction show where the US and China basically allied then moved to another solar system, whatever Chinese language there is probably wouldn’t really be too close to what we would hear today. Or it’s some sort of trade creole, or whatever.

38

Considering there is no one single Chinese language, it’s an interesting thought experiment to wonder what would happen if a microcosm of China went to live in isolation somewhere-- on another planet, or wherever.

According to a Taiwanese friend of mine, pretty much everyone in China studies Mandarin in school, so I’m guessing that in the microcosm, the non-native Mandarin speakers would be using what Mandarin they knew as a lingua franca, but I’m still pretty sure that for various reasons words from other dialects would end up in whatever language developed, and that the influence of all the non-native speakers would alter the pronunciation of this para-Mandarin significantly.

Add a group of American English speakers to the mix, and two facts of language assimilation: one, that more Chinese people will have studied English than Americans will have studied Mandarin; and two, that Americans are extremely facile in assimilating loan words, my prediction would be that after about three generations, when you have a new language, and no longer a pidgin or creole, the grammar will be more English-like, albeit, with lots of irregular forms lost, and lots of English vocabulary will have survived for anything that was more prominent or popular among the first generation of Americans; however, any time Mandarin and English vocabulary items were in competition, and pretty much evenly matched, the Mandarin word would tend to win out.

I would also predict that Roman orthography would win out, but some simplified Chinese characters might survive as abbreviations, much like the ampersand; there would just be a lot more of them.

One unknown variable I can’t guess at is prestige. In situations where pidgins and creoles develop, and eventually emerge as a new language (ie, Middle English from Old English and Norman French), sometimes one language is considered more prestigious than the other, so the people speaking the original pidgin make an effort to use one language over the other.

I’m not just making crap up, FWIW. My mother had a PhD in linguistics, and books full of stories of real situations where things like this happened.

/hijack

39

Does Liv Tyler get any love? She just demonstrated that now, twenty years later, she can still do her speech in Elvish from The Fellowship of the Ring.

I’m not sure how we’d test her accent, though.