I’m reminded of the Larson cartoon with the scientists listening to dolphins: “No, nothing intelligent. Just more of that “Ha Blah Ess Pan Yole” gibberish”
That’s kinda what happens in the original Judgment at Nuremberg, during the opening argument of Maximillian Schell’s character, the attorney for the defense who was speaking German. The speech began in German, with pauses for the official English court translators, and then suddenly there was a sort of zoom-in closeup at which point Schell suddenly began speaking in English. OTOH, many of the questions made to German-speaking witnesses were depicted as having to be translated through an earpiece, while they in turn spoke accented English that (presumbly) had to be translated to the English-speaking attorneys and judges. It seems more confusing in my explanation than it actually is.
(I wonder if the same thing happened in the remake that was on, uh, TNT a few years ago? Because IIRC, Alec Baldwin was in that, and maybe that’s what you’re thinking of?)
You’re right, “It’s a trap!” is obviously English. I don’t know who I was thinking of.
Jabba the Hutt, probably.
In the 1970s TV series Grizzly Adams Adams always spoke English and his Indian friend Nakoma always spoke whatever Native American language he spoke*, and they understood each other perfectly. The TV series debuted in February 1977, three months before Star Wars was released. There was an earlier Grizzly Adams movie (1974) with the same actors, but I don’t remember if the movie used the same device.
*Don Shanks, the actor who played Nakoma is Cherokee, but I want to say the character was supposed to be Shoshone.
Well, with my limited and pretty unsuccessful experience with trying to learn Spanish I learned this.
Its **much **easier to understand another language than it is to speak it.
Understanding only requires a passing and almost passive understanding of a language. Speaking it requires much more mental agility IMO.
Of course this falls apart if both side abilities are pretty poor or is the discussion is very nuanced or complicated.
But the practice makes sense to me in a way.
Its a lot easier to understand a language than speak it, and many people who understand a language may fins actually speaking it difficult. I understand Farsi perfectly, just don’t ask me to speak it.
I do this all the time. I am often in business meetings that are conducted mostly in afrikaans but I will speak in english because my pronounciation is atrocious.
An even wierder situation occurs when people will switch between languages multiple times in a conversation. This is because people will default to the language they are most comfortable with if they are having problems getting a concept across. An engineer I work with, for example, will speak in afrikaans but switch to english for technical stuff because most of the techincal terms are in english and he thinks about them in english.
Go to India, or Pakistan or to a lesser extent Afghnaistan. Ask someone “how many languages do you know” and they will answer “I speak x, y, z and I can also understand a, b and c”. The above posters bit is known as “code swithcing”. And its not weird, its natural. At least in my opinion.
So? They’re all different species with different vocal equipment. Usually they physically *can’t *speak another species’ language. BFD.
A similar scene was in Star Trek VI. Kirk and McCoy are in the dock holding translators to their ears while Kang begins his arguments in Klingon. The camera pans up to a bank of people translating. It then pans back down to Kang who is now speaking English.
Calm down there, cowboy. No one said anything about anything being a big deal.
You’re an unusually confrontational fellow, ElvisL1ves.
Actually, to me the best part of this is that when they switch (on a tight close up of Sam Neill’s lips, the last Russian word/first English word is, I believe the same in both languages: Armageddon.
Clever, that.
I’ve always liked that exchange (and the movie in general). As I recall, Ryan says, in Russian, “It is wise to know the ways of your adversary, don’t you think?” And Ramius says, in English, “It is.”
I remember this quite well. The way they translated what Nakoma said with out subtitles was to repeat his words back in English like this: “your right Naokoma a bear really does shit in the woods.”