Of course there are a lot of movies in which the characters are speaking, say German, even though the actors are speaking English. In other words, for example, the movie may be set in Germany, and the characters are understood to be speakin German–even though the words actually coming out of the actors’ mouths are English.
Now, suppose in such a film, an a German-speaking character encounters someone speaking English. To the German character, the English language is incomprehensible. But to most of the audience of the film, English is their native tongue. So if the English-speaking character is actually speaking English, then the audience can understand what the character is saying.
But what if the film is supposed to be largely through the point of view of that German speaking character? The English-speaker’s speech, then, should be as incomprehensible to the audience as it is to the German-speaking character.
And my question is, has that been done, and how has it been done? I don’t mean about German and English specifically, just whether there have been movies done in one language (call it X), where the characters are mostly speakers of another language, and where X-speech in the movie is somehow portrayed in a way that makes it incomprehensible to the (X-speaking) audience.
I can’t really answer your question, but I did see a similar oddity once. We were watching a dubbed version of Home Alone in French class, so everybody was speaking French all along. However, once the family gets to their hotel room in Paris, one of them calls down to the lobby and asks, “parlez-vous anglais?” (Do you speak English?)
Not a film but there was an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 where Quark, Rom, & Nog accidently travel back to the 20th century and crash in New Mexico. Their universal translator implants weren’t working and from the point of view of the two army scientists observing them they spoke Ferengi (ie we the audience actually heard them speaking Ferengi), then the scene switch to the point of Quark & co and they heard the scientists English speaking as high pitched gibberish (which is what we head too).
The British comedy 'Allo 'Allo handeled it by the speaker’s language being indicated by their accent. French people spoke with an outrageous French Accent, British people with a similarly outrageous English accent. Everyone of course can’t understand the other accent leading to no end of comic confusion.
I swear I’ve seen a movie recently where this situation occurred and the English speakers were dubbed with recordings of their voices played backwards. Can’t remember which film, though.
In at least one episode of Lost, we see the castaways from the viewpoint of the non-English speaking Korean couple, and they’re all speaking gibberish.
In Star Trek VI, during Kirk and McCoy’s trial, everyone in court is speaking Klingon, but the bulk of the scene has it rendered into English, which Kirk and McCoy listening in to their little handheld translators with looks of consternation on their faces – especially when Gen. Krang, channeling Adlai Stevenson, demanded “Don’t wait for the translation! Answer me now!”
Let’s not forget the British officer whose poor attempts to speak in French were represented by French-accented English laden with mostly mispronunciations and malapropisms.
I think this is exactly what the OP is asking for.
There’s an episode of the British sitcom ‘Coupling’ where one of the characters meets an Israeli woman who can only speak Hebrew. The ‘conversation’ between the two characters is shown twice - first from the English speaker’s perspective (he speaks English, she speaks Hebrew), and then from the Hebrew speaker’s perspective (she speaks English, and he speaks Spanish).
That was one of the relatively few good things about 'Allo, 'Allo!– it did a good, and quite funny, job of conveying the terrible French that the English characters were supposed to be speaking. The French characters reacted like they could barely make out what zee Eenglish were saying.
… what, you expected them to ask “parlez-vous francais?” The characters are American no matter what language they’ve been dubbed into… it’s a re-voicing, not a re-filming!
There’s a Japanese series called The Twelve Kingdoms, which involves three Japanese high school students carried away to a fantasy kingdom, where another language is spoken. One of them actually belongs there (though she didn’t know it) and understands the language immediately, but the other two don’t. But it’s just done by the voice actors all speaking Japanese regardless of which language they are supposed to be speaking, and we are just reminded from time to time of the two-language situation when one characters says to another, “I have no idea what you are saying,” or something like that.
My computer crapped out last night when I tried to post the clip from Coupling, but here it is: Part One (towards the end), and Part Two (at the beginning).
I’ve had the exact opposite problem with a film once. It was a film made and set in Quebec, for Quebecois audiences, so all the dialog was in French (and since it was a college class here that was watching it, we were watching it with English subtitles). Well, there was a scene in a hospital, and all of the doctors are speaking English, so the main character (previously speaking French in the movie) switched to English to talk to them. And since the audience was primarily francophone, the movie, for that portion, had French subtitles.
OK, so far, all of that is straightforward. But the actress’s English was so atrocious that I actually found it easier to read the French subtitles (using elementary-school French classes I had taken seven years earlier) than to try to understand what she was saying.