It’s been eighty-eight years since Lew Ayres played a German soldier in All Quiet on the Western Front, and that movie is considered a classic. Casting actors to play characters of a different nationality has been done since the very beginning of the movies themselves, and there’s no reason to think that it will die out any time soon, even in an increasingly globalized industry.
I saw Star Wars several times in its original release, and IIRC Greedo’s dialogue was always subtitled.
I don’t remember Greedo being subtitled, and was surprised by it when I saw the new, improved version. I think he just goes Ooba Deeba Gleeba Solo? and Han answers in English.
District 9 did the seem thing. Humans & Prawns are anatomically incapble of speaking eachother’s languages.
Supposedly they did originally plan for Picard to speak with a French accent, but while shooting the pilot the result was too comically to be taken seriously. I’ve heard the DVDs have some clips of that as a bonus feature. It did seem really weird in that episode when he visited his family in France on vacation (after deassimilating from the Bor) since they all had British accents (including IIRC the local mayor), then again I assume the characters were really speaking French, not English.
The language situtation on Stargate: SG1 always bugged me. Every single planet they visit has everyone speaking English, usually with North American accents, despite the local humans being harvested from Earth millenia ago.
True, but Costner’s flat American vowels were very jarring and out-of-context; I think it actually detracted from the characterization. I especially remember wincing at him saying “Thanks” to Morgan Freeman. Horrible.
Because British English is the most familiar (to Americans) European dialect of English. Or, I should specify, Estuary English and RP, which are the two dialects most often heard in American movies. RP also connotes sophistication to us, so it is the dialect of aristocrats, ancient Romans, European academics and villains (but not thugs).
One of the cleverest treatments of language I ever saw was in *The Thirteenth Warrior. *Antonio Banderas plays a medieval Arab merchant who travels (for some reason I’ve forgotten) with a group of Norse warriors back to their homeland. During the trip, he’s shown sitting around the fire with the warriors, who are speaking in their native language (I think the actors are speaking Norwegian during these scenes). Gradually, the actors begin to sprinkle their Norwegian with English words, then sentences, until they are saying all their lines in English. It’s how the film depicts Banderas’ character picking up their language. Very clever, I thought.
This is exactly what happens in real life when my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law are talking to each other. Mother-in-law speaks Chinese, sister-in-law responds in English. It looks weird, but it works for them.
I’ve never become truly fluent in any foreign language, but my experience is the opposite: I usually speak halting German (or Spanish or French) to someone who responds in halting English. I’ve always thought it easier to speak a few words of a foreign language than to understand it when spoken to me. This way, the conversation automatically drops to the level of mutual understanding.
That’s true at the very beginners stage of learning. But later when you start to become close to fluent and someone else is close to fluent in your language, it’s easier just to speak your own native languages, because you know the other party will get it.
As an analogy.: A mediocre math student can read a great theorem and understand it, but he can’t write the same kind of theorem - he’d make too many mistakes.
In 2010: Odyssey Two, Arthur C. Clarke wrote that the Soviet members of a joint Soviet-U.S. space mission would make it a point to always speak in English, and the U.S. members would always speak in Russian, so that each would have the chance to improve their grasp of the others’ language.
A Doper here some years ago suggested that there was a second Hundred Years’s War or the like, and that all French people spoke with British accents by Picard’s time. Not a bad fanwank.
It is possible to speak a second language so well that one has “no accent”. (That is, speaking with the accent of a native speaker of the second language rather than the accent of the first language.) Since the UK is a lot closer to Continental Europe than the US or Canada, a Frenchman would be more likely to have had a British English teacher than a North American one and could more easily visit the UK than North America. I would expect that a Frenchman who spoke English like a native would be a lot more likely to have learned British “BBC English” than North American “newscaster English”.
I just checked Memory Alpha just to make sure I wasn’t misremembering, but Picard’s accent is never addressed at any point in the series or the movies, nor is his interest in Shakespeare or his proclivity for Earl Grey tea.
My theory is that Picard *doesn’t *speak English; we only *hear *him speaking English because of the Universal Translator.