# Inappropriate Accents in Films with Foreign Dialogue **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 6, 2013, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inappropriate-accents-in-films-with-foreign-dialogue/660308 "2013-06-06T17:37:49Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Mississippienne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d2c977/32.png) [@Mississippienne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mississippienne)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2013, 4:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inappropriate-accents-in-films-with-foreign-dialogue/660308/21 "2013-06-07T04:36:55Z")
> [@Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](#): > > I heard it was just the opposite - that Mary Mcdonnell’s Lakota was actually a “male” dialect. All the Sioux characters spoke Lakota with female syntax. > [@](#): > > Lakota is a language that is morphologically marked for gender, and particularly with regard to the use of enclitics, forms change depending on the gender of the speaker. All of the actors in\* Dances With Wolves \*use the female form of the language throughout the film despite the obvious incongruity for native speakers of Lakota. – from Michael Cronin’s _Translation goes to the Movies_, 2008. ---
**Author:** ![shijinn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/cc9497/32.png) [@shijinn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/shijinn)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2013, 4:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inappropriate-accents-in-films-with-foreign-dialogue/660308/22 "2013-06-07T04:54:48Z")
> [@Morbo](#): > > When **Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon** came out … at least those are intelligible accents. most of the time, when you hear any form of Chinese on an American movie or TV, it’s gibberish spoken with a mouthful of tapioca balls soaked with drool. ---
**Author:** ![GovernmentMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e9c0ed/32.png) [@GovernmentMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GovernmentMan)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2013, 10:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inappropriate-accents-in-films-with-foreign-dialogue/660308/23 "2013-06-07T10:01:20Z")
Not a movie, but the videogame Resident Evil 4 is set in Spain but the side characters all speak in Mexican accents ---
**Author:** ![HazelNutCoffee](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/ac91a4/32.png) [@HazelNutCoffee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HazelNutCoffee)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2013, 10:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inappropriate-accents-in-films-with-foreign-dialogue/660308/24 "2013-06-07T10:20:23Z")
Not a movie, but I watched the first season of Lost and it really annoyed me that the Korean dude was supposed to be a Korean who had lived in Korea his entire life and was unable to speak much English. Every time he said anything in Korean, you could immediately tell that he was Korean American. He had the thickest accent ever. I watched one episode of Without a Trace where the story was supposed to be about a Korean family. They all spoke Korean with Chinese accents. In that terrible James Bond movie with Halle Berry, the supposedly North Korean dude spoke like he was from South Korea. ---
**Author:** ![hogarth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hogarth/32/1773_2.png) [@hogarth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hogarth)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2013, 11:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inappropriate-accents-in-films-with-foreign-dialogue/660308/25 "2013-06-07T11:21:16Z")
> [@jovan](#): > > There was a crappy Bruce Willis movie called “The Whole Nine Yards” that was set in Montreal, and features truly atrocious “French” accents that are obviously attempts at doing something Parisian which is completely unlike a Montreal accent. Rosanna Arquette sounded like she had a Martian accent. Seriously, I couldn’t tell what the hell she was aiming for. ---
**Author:** ![corkboard](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e9bcb4/32.png) [@corkboard](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/corkboard)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2013, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inappropriate-accents-in-films-with-foreign-dialogue/660308/26 "2013-06-07T13:35:17Z")
Russell Crowe in _Gladiator_, playing a Roman nicknamed “the Spaniard” who spoke with an Australian accent. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2013, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inappropriate-accents-in-films-with-foreign-dialogue/660308/27 "2013-06-07T14:36:54Z")
German officers in WWII movies were invariably Englishmen. I grew up thinking that James Mason was German.😉 ---
**Author:** ![Floater](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/dc4da7/32.png) [@Floater](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Floater)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2013, 11:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inappropriate-accents-in-films-with-foreign-dialogue/660308/28 "2013-06-12T11:03:03Z")
> [@terentii](#): > > What amazes me is when the translator in a documentary tries to do the accent of the person being interviewed (usually Russian or German). The resulting voiceover is usually laughably bad. Which is why I hate when Swedish television shows imported programs with voiceovers instead of the original recorded sounds with subtitles. Why can’t American/British/Whatever TV companies provide copies without them when selling the programs abroad? ---
**Author:** ![CCYMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/87869e/32.png) [@CCYMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CCYMan)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2013, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inappropriate-accents-in-films-with-foreign-dialogue/660308/29 "2013-06-12T14:05:23Z")
> [@HazelNutCoffee](#): > > Not a movie, but I watched the first season of Lost and it really annoyed me that the Korean dude was supposed to be a Korean who had lived in Korea his entire life and was unable to speak much English. Every time he said anything in Korean, you could immediately tell that he was Korean American. He had the thickest accent ever. > > I watched one episode of Without a Trace where the story was supposed to be about a Korean family. They all spoke Korean with Chinese accents. > > In that terrible James Bond movie with Halle Berry, the supposedly North Korean dude spoke like he was from South Korea. White guy who speaks Korean here. I was thrilled to hear that even I could tell they guy from Lost had an accent - I was like “hey he speaks Korean worse than me!” Then I saw him on Hawaii Five-Oh and realized that his English is that of someone born and raised in the US. In the recent remake of the film Red Dawn, North Korea launches an invasion on the Pacific Northwest (the first of many idiotic premises you need to overlook in order to enjoy that movie). In that one, not only did they have bad accents, most of them didn’t even look Korean. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2013, 2:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inappropriate-accents-in-films-with-foreign-dialogue/660308/30 "2013-06-12T14:08:10Z")
> [@CCYMan](#): > > White guy who speaks Korean here. I was thrilled to hear that even I could tell they guy from Lost had an accent - I was like “hey he speaks Korean worse than me!” Then I saw him on Hawaii Five-Oh and realized that his English is that of someone born and raised in the US. I knew the actor from his previous work - for instance, he played a recurring character called “Gavin” on \*Angel \*- so my first reaction was “Hey, I didn’t know he spoke Korean.” The fact that he had an accent was no surprise - not many people can speak two languages with no accent in either. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2013, 2:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inappropriate-accents-in-films-with-foreign-dialogue/660308/31 "2013-06-12T14:08:33Z")
> [@corkboard](#): > > Russell Crowe in _Gladiator_, playing a Roman nicknamed “the Spaniard” who spoke with an Australian accent. Yes, but accents were not a particular part of the “realism” of that movie, which was emphatically a mythologized slice of Roman culture than specific, real events and people. And nobody spoke Latin in it. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2013, 2:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inappropriate-accents-in-films-with-foreign-dialogue/660308/32 "2013-06-12T14:25:23Z")
I read somewhere that Crowe actually wanted to use a Spanish accent, but Ridley Scott wouldn’t let him. ---
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2013, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inappropriate-accents-in-films-with-foreign-dialogue/660308/33 "2013-06-12T15:06:03Z")
> [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](#): > > Sean Connery speaks Russian in _The Hunt For Red October_; he of course uses the same accent from his performance as Juan Sánchez Villa-Lobos Ramírez. Isn’t that supposed to be a clue? He speaks differently, because he’s a Balt, not a Russian. ---
**Author:** ![vontsira](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/51bf81/32.png) [@vontsira](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/vontsira)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2013, 10:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inappropriate-accents-in-films-with-foreign-dialogue/660308/34 "2013-06-14T10:02:40Z")
Everyone on this thread seems dauntingly brilliant about accents ! I’m very bad at telling one accent from another, so nearly all the annoyances told of here, would go right over my head. I maybe have the excuse of being British, resident in Britain – but I couldn’t tell a Spanish Spanish accent from a Mexican from a Puerto Rican from a Bolivian one, to save my life. And the matter of translators speaking in the interviewee’s accent, usually badly: something I’m not aware of ever having come across. Is it maybe a particularly American thing? It’s possible to feel that occasionally, there’s something to be said for ignorance – it can save one a good deal of irritation ! Though nitpicking mistakes in films, novels, etc., can be a pleasure in its own right. There are subjects on which I can be a purist and pedant in that way; but with accents, I’m utterly at sea. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inappropriate-accents-in-films-with-foreign-dialogue/660308.md?page=1)