So I was watching “Blue Is The Warmest Color” (GREAT lesbian sex scenes, btw) and the female protagonist is a smoker. She smokes a LOT onscreen. She’s one of those sleepy-eyed French beauties with big, puffy lips, and there were plenty of images of her smoking, including after sex. And after about the third or fourth scene, I suddenly thought, “DAMN, she looks so STUPID with that cigarette hanging out of her mouth!”
I don’t think that’s what the filmmaker intended. It’s a French film, I think the director thought it would make her look cool, but to me, it made her look stupid. I think it’s because that’s how a lot of Americans, including me, see cigarette smoking and cigarette smokers … not a cool thing, but a signifier of stupidity. The sleepy eyes and the puffy lips didn’t help either.
Clearly, there’s a culture divide there, the protagonist otherwise was portrayed as fairly intelligent and likable, an edgy sort of woman who followed her sexual impulses wherever they lay.
So what are other examples of things that don’t translate well between cultures … I’m not talking about language necessarily. I would include language if there were concepts that don’t translate well, such as the difference between some native Americans’ concept of gender and European settlers’ concept of gender, i.e.,calling a wintke a hermaphroditeas the European settlers did was not only factually wrong but completely missed the cultural connotations.
I’m betting a few Dopers have noticed other such cultural mistranslations.
A lot of Japanese movies have women talking in this falsetto voice. Apparently it’s considered pleasant in Japan but I think most Americans just find it annoying.
Yes, I’ve heard that in Japan female customer service agents who work on the phone are trained to talk in that artificially high-pitched voice as well. I’ve heard it often enough in anime and yeah, it’s annoying.
I’ve heard that Bollywood movies have become cult movies here. I can’t understand why. I’ve watched clips of two releases. I personally found them way over the top and I doubt I could watch more than ten minutes of them. YMMV.
Sometimes its subtle things. I once saw an Ingmar Bergman movie where, at the end, one character was at the bottom of a apartment stairway going through some sort of emotional turmoil and pouring his heart out to another character. In the middle, the lights went out. We were trying to figure out why the second character had turned out the lights at that moment.
It was pointed out that lights in apartment stairways in Sweden were on timers and shut off by themselves. As 1970s Americans, we never heard of such a thing.
Another difference was the movie Burke and Wills. It’s a historical film set in Australia. Americans complained when some critic spoiled the ending, but no Australian ever would, since the story is part of the national culture. It’d be like complaining about revealing the ending of a biography of Lincoln.
I recall when the movie Les Miserables was released, John Stewart had Anne Hathaway as a guest on his show and she mentioned a character who died in the movie. The audience reacted to her “spoiling” the movie and Stewart responded “Read a book!”
I got the most befuddled look out of a bunch of co-workers once when they asked if I’d gone to see “The Passion of the Christ”, and I replied with no, I hadn’t and that I wasn’t interested because I knew how it ended already.
When “Jaws” came out in '75, the Germans had to call it “Summer of the White Death,” because they have no word for “jaws” :dubious: (it’s what I heard). I always wondered if that affected ticket sales–terrible title.
I’m reminded of a time. way back when we were in grad school, when a friend and I watched the French film Jules et Jim for the first time. For no reason that we could fathom, Jeanne Moreau’s character suddenly drove her car into a pond.
My bewildered friend said, “These are people with sensibilities far removed from our own.” I still quote her on that whenever we’re watching a film where a character does something abrupt and strange.
I remember reading somewhere that some non-American audiences were absolutely baffled and bored by the then prodigious output of westerns from US cinema. They didn’t understand the cultural obsession the US had with them and the character archetypes within.
In Germany, American Westerns always drew in prodigious numbers. I have spoken with more than a few Germans whose favorite film was an American Western, often The Searchers..
For me:
[ol]
[li]Eastern cultures reticence about adult sexuality and nudity translate very poorly - It’s ridiculous that nations who have serious issues with overpopulation also seem to be very circumspect when it comes to sex and nudity.[/li][li]Humor rarely translates between cultures - With the exception of English/Irish comedies, here in the US most foreign comedy films do very poorly as their humor really seen as being “funny” by Americans[/li][li]Historical perspectives rarely translate between cultures - German and Japanese perspectives upon WWII will probably not jibe with how Americans and others see their roles during the conflict. Colonialism will be viewed in an entirely different light when seen from the perspective of the colonizer and the colonized.[/li][/ol]
I believe this. I have a record Sing Mit Von Vilden Vesten (my spelling is likely wrong). It is all your favorite cowboy songs, sung in German. My favorite is Geister riders In Der Sky. I originally bought the record for my dad, who was really into unusual music. He was not surprised by the existence of the record and noted that Germans used to really love American Westerns.
