I know we’re suppose to suspend disbelief and all that when we watch movies, but there are some things they sometimes do with language that bug the hell out of me, to the extent that it yanks me right out of the film.
The worst one, for me, is when half a conversation is subtitled, the other half in English, and yet, neither of the people conversing seem to find this unusual.
It happens a lot in the Star Wars movies - and I guess fans will just argue that it means everyone is a bit bilingual, but it’s still not realistic - conversations between bilingual people do not (usually) work like that - one side speaking only in one language, one speaking only the other.
It also happens in a fair bit in Hellboy 2 - many of the supernatural characters speak some other language (and are subtitled), but have no trouble understanding English.
The other thing (a bit similar) is when some characters put on an accent and others don’t - this appears a lot in old movies about WWII - some of the actors playing German officers speak English with German accent affectations, but others simply don’t bother.
Of course, I understand that in reality, those conversations would all have been in German, not English with a German accent, but still, it’s the inconsistency that sticks out so badly, it becomes the focus of my attention.
I’ll cut Star Wars some slack here, as the implication seems to be that the aliens can’t speak the human language (Common? Basic? I forget), and vice versa. Different species lack the vocal hardware capable of producing others’ sounds. I mean, could you see Han speaking Wookie?
I’ve seen it many a time. Hell, I’ve done it many times. Basically, it is mainly used when both sides understand both languages but don’t feel comfortable speaking in the other person’s language. Understanding is a lot easier than using the language yourself.
One suggestion concerning those WWII films in which some Nazis spoke English with a German accent & some without–while they were all supposedly speaking German: German actors.
In my perfect world, all the parts would be spoken in the correct languages, with subtitles as needed. But how many actors are multilingual? And some people really hate subtitles.
The Mel Brooks version of To Be Or Not To Be found a solution; they began speaking Polish, then there was an announcement to the audience that they’d switch to English for our sake. In The Hunt For Red October, the sub crew spoke Russian to each other, then switched to English as one pronounced the word “Armageddon.” (Sean Connery’s character was from one of the Baltic SSR’s; perhaps that excuses his Scottish accent.) I haven’t read the book, but I’m betting there was translation going on after the Americans boarded the sub; the movie kept it simple by having everybody speak English.
Really, I don’t mind as long as they try to keep things consistent. And as long as Julia Roberts doesn’t try an Irish accent…
One of the most awesome things about Inglorious Basterds was the language switch in the first scene. When I saw it, I thought Tarantino was doing a Hunt for Red October thing (and being really obvious about it, in a wink-wink, tearing down the fourth wall kind of way), but then it becomes clear that there is actually a plot reason for it. And it continues though the whole movie. It’s about equal parts English, French and German, the actors all have the correct nationality and every line of dialogue is spoken in the language appropriate for that exact moment. Even small things are very telling - I, as a native German, definitely picked up on the British double agent’s weird accent, and his mistake with the three fingers made me flinch immediately. Really great handling of language and communication overall.
The thing that bugged me there was the presumption that a French farmer would be fluent in English. I’ve lived in rural France for months at a stretch, and never found a French farmer who spoke or understood a word of English beyond “weekend” and “okay.”
I love Children of a Lesser God, but I have to admit that it kind of bugs me that when Marlee Matlin is signing something to William Hurt, the script essentially has Hurt repeat out loud what Matlin just signed before he responds. It’s such an awkward device, and there’s an easy fix, too: subtitle her dialogue. They wouldn’t have even had to use subtitles for him, because I’ve seen hearing people say out loud what they’re signing to deaf people, so that seems much less awkward to me (especially since the character’s signing was supposedly rusty). But if they had used subtitles for him as well, that would have been even better.
My mind may be playing tricks on me, but I seem to recall the very first release of Star Wars in theaters didn’t subtitle Greedo’s talk with Han. Then in later video releases they did. Am I imagining the whole thing? It worked better not knowing specifically what the bounty hunter was saying.
In Game of Thrones, we have family members who have different accents. Just seems weird. And I think the dwarf guy’s fake British accent sounds terrible.
Well, that was a stage play first, so the script for that would have been written with Leeds repeating what Sarah was signing. Otherwise the audience would have very little clue as to what was going on, with subtitles not being very convenient in the theatre (yes, I have seen the superscript titles used for operas, so it’s possible, just not convenient).
Which doesn’t mean they couldn’t have changed it for the movie and used subtitles … if they were more interested in keeping the feel and pacing of the play script, that might have been one reason.
As to the OP: Kevin Costner in “Robin Hood:Prince of Thieves.” That horrendous attempt at an accent - which I think he gave up on at one point - absolutely bugged me.
very few people in Hollywood speaks intelligible Mandarin or Cantonese. it’s especially jarring when it’s intended to reflect a character’s fluency or worldliness or something.
ii)Yes, but I think you might be misunderstanding me.
I’ve seen multilingual conversations in progress, a lot - and in fact, I’m comparing movies against my experience of having witnessed conversations between multilingual Asians.
In real life, these conversations switched back and forth freely - often mid-sentence, between the two languages.
In movies (at least the type I’m complaining about) you have one character talking one language, subtitled, and the other character speaking English - and although both clearly and fully understand each others’ language, they only ever speak in their own.
I mean, maybe this happens a lot in the real world, but I’ve witnessed a lot of different cross-cultural conversations and never, ever seen one like it appears in the movies.
I’ve always found it silly that Hollywood uses any one of the United Kingdom English accents as the default European accent, regardless of the character’s natural language. At least Star Trek: TNG lampshaded this as Captain Picard received his education in England, despite being a Frenchman.
A hundred years from now, movie viewers will laugh at the idea of Kenneth Branagh playing a Nazi officer.
I’ve never seen Game of Thrones so I don’t know how extreme this is, but people in my own family have different (regional US) accents.
As for the OP, when I was in Germany a few years back I did my best to ask for directions, etc., with whatever German I remembered from school/my phrasebook, but people tended to reply in English. At first I just switched back to English myself, but after a few days I thought “Why did I bother studying German if I wasn’t going to speak German while in Germany?” and stuck with German as much as I could. Several times I had brief conversations with native German speakers where I spoke German and they spoke English.
My longest conversation entirely in German was actually with two Japanese students who’d been studying in Germany. They told me that people kept trying to speak English to them (assuming that two Asians were more likely to speak English than German) but that their English really wasn’t very good and they were much more comfortable with German.