Most of the time in an English language film, chatracters who are clearly not speaking English will either speak in their language with subtitles, or speak in English anyway with the underlying assumption that they are really speaking French or German etc. Occasionaly though there is a time when there is an event of dramatic importance, where they speak their own language without subtitles. The monoglot English speakers like me are left to wonder what they’re talking about, then later it gets revealed. In scenes such as this do the characters really offer up plot spoiling information to the bilingual viewer?
You mean like “bleth toodi” (sp ?) from “Quick Change” ? 
I think movies are produced for a target (language) audience. So yes, non-subtitled foreign language (if authentic) would be a spoiler for someone who spoke the language. It could give away some big plot device in some cases.
Hee. It depends. I know all of Hindi lines in Indiana Jones: Temple of Doom really are in Hindi, but they’re not plot lines - they’re basically along the lines of “Beat him! Beat him more!” and “Chase them! Don’t let them get away!”
One day I translated all of the Hindi lines and wrote them down somewhere for shits and giggles.
The first scene I thought of when I saw this thread title is the one in The Godfather where Michael, Sollozzo, and McCluskey are at the restaurant and there’s some unsubtitled dialogue in Italian between Sollozzo and Michael just before Michael leaves to go into the bathroom to get the gun. However, we never do get an English translation of what was said so I’m not sure if it was that significant.
My francophone husband and I were watching “Snatch” in English with subtitles, for his sake. When Brad Pitt’s character opened his mouth, the subtitles disappeared, leaving all present equally in the dark. I wonder what secrets the film would have yielded had one of us been fluent in Pikey…
They’ve done this a number of times in the TV show “Lost”. They usually caption it when Sun and Jin are speaking to each other in Korean, but there have been some scenes where the dialog goes uncaptioned. Usually somebody translates for the benefit of the rest of us non-Korean-speaking viewers on one of the many “Lost” fan/info sites. Most of the time, these lines go along with what’s happening in the current scene, but I can’t recall any of them having been crucial plot issues (as in, if you missed the contents of the line, then you really missed something).
“My Name Is Earl” also throws in non-captioned lines in Spanish from Catalina. But more often than not, these are made to look like Catalina is ranting at somebody rapidly in Spanish, but the lines themselves have nothing to do with the scene – instead, these are kind of “Easter Eggs”, things like thanking viewers for loyally watching season 1 of the show, and the like.
I think there was a similar issue with The Usual Suspects and the use of Hungarian in the film. I don’t speak Hungarian, but from listening to the director’s commentary,
apparently the name Keyser Soze basically means “King Talks a lot” in Hungarian, which would immediately give away who the name really referred to.
In “Once,” the guy and the girl are talking, and he asks her if she loves her (estranged) husband. She says something in her native language (which he doesn’t speak) that isn’t translated at all in the film – but apparently is
“No, I love you.”
Not a film example but Cormac McCarthy regularly has Spanish dialogue in *All The Pretty Horses *and its sequels and I’ve never been able to ascertain whether I’ve missed something not being able to understand it.
Perhaps this example is not exactly what the OP was looking for, but in Mel Gibson’s the Passion of the Christ (which I did not see myself), there was a line of aramaic dialogue that was originally was subtitled, which was particularly offensive to jewish critics. Several groups protested, asking for the entire line to be cut from the film. Gibson’s answer was to keep the line, but remove the translated subtitle, so the insulting line was still uttered, just very few people in the audience knew what it meant.
My fiance and I made the mistake of trying to watch Syriana without subtitles on. Half the movie is in Arabic. There’s no English-speaking character parroting what the Arab characters are saying either. So if you don’t turn the subtitles on, you easily miss half the movie.
Ooh, what is “Beat him! Beat him more!” in Hindi? That’s the sort of knowledge that could come in handy one day…
It may mean “King Talk a Lot” in some language, but it aint Hungarian.
Actually, we were watching Saving Private Ryan last night and were wondering about a bit of dialogue. Getting towards the end, when the Americans are about to blow up the bridge, around the same time some Allied planes show up to save the day, after Hanks & Sizemore are shot, one American who got trapped behind the Germans gets the drop on four (I think it was four) Germans. One of them says something- just from the acting, it could have been “Hey, I know you; you’re from my town” or something like that- and the American shoots him. Anyone know what that was?
They had an interesting reversal in season 2. The scene contained Jin, Sawyer, and Bernard. Sawyer congratulates Jin on his wife’s pregnancy, but Jin can’t understand him. To emphasize this, the scene switches to Jin’s point of view. Suddenly, both Sawyer and Bernard are speaking gibberish – totally unintelligible nonsense. It was really weird, but very effective.
My Hungarian is rusty, but “[The] King Talks a Lot” would be something like [a] király sok beszél. I’m fairly certain “Keyser,” though, would be recognized as the German Kaiser (or Hungarian császár), meaning “Emperor,” of course. I’d have to ask some native Hungarians, but there may very well be some word that means something like “wordy” or “gabby” with “Söze.” That spelling doesn’t mean anything to me in Hungarian, but the pronunciation in the movie, “SO-say”, sounds like the Hungarian word for “word” – szó – with some sort of ending. The closest Hungarian word I could find that matches the pronunciation SO-say is szószék, which means pulpit (literally “word seat”). The word for long-winded is szószátyár. So, close but no cigar. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the root for the name is the Hungarian word for “word.”
There’s subtitles? We got that movie on videotape and there were none, I assumed we were supposed to figure out what was going on by context. In most cases, it was pretty easy to do, but it made it a very strange movie for me.
I’m not going to spoiler out of laziness, but I really don’t think it matters at this point.
Both my parents are native Hungarian speakers, and I’m pretty fluent. So-say doesn’t match anything I’m familiar with.
It’s a big stretch but I guess if you mix English, German and Hungarian you would get
German - Kaiser - King
Hungarian - Szo’ - word
English - say - says
Needless to say, I don’t think Hungarian speakers would be angry at the spoiler.
I don’t know German, but that was the same guy they’d caught at the beginning of the film, and decided to let go rather than summarily execute. The American who kills him was the guy who had originally convinced the rest of the squad to let him go. I imagine that his dialogue was something like, “Hey, remember me? You guys captured me last week, and let me go!”
Yep, that’s good enough for me. I can’t possible see how “King Talk-a-lot” works into Hungarian. Plus the spelling of his character on the IMDB page is “Söse,” which doesn’t look terribly Hungarian to me, never mind that fact that it’d be pronounced “SHÖ-sheh” in Hungarian. I do recall the characters in that movie speaking actual Hungarian in the foreign language parts, although with terrible accent/pronunciation. But it was real Hungarian, IIRC.