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(Mis)representation of language in Hollywood movies
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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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I remember watching Batman Begins, and Christian Bale dropped an awful line in Mandarin but pronounced some words like Cantonese (he butchered "I'm not a criminal" into "I'm not a rice wheel / cloud"). I'm always amazed that how much are the actors getting paid, yet can't afford to hire a language coach or just some random person from Chinatown to be on set and help them rehearse just one line of sentence that has 5 words in it (我不是犯人)
I'm reminded of this because, I was watching season 2 of Fringe yesterday, in one episode, Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) claimed that he could speak some Cantonese, and he indeed spoke a couple of okay Cantonese lines in that episode, he didn't sound like native, but it's believable enough as a character who needed to learn the language to do some shady dealings in the past. The lines were not butchered or sounded exaggerated, and I don't think Joshua Jackson himself was getting paid in millions while filming Fringe.
It's even more jarring when Hollywood hires Asian actors to do lines in Asian languages that are not their native languages. I've heard this quite often, when they hire a Korean actors to speak Mandarin / Cantonese, and they sounded awful.
Also, in Japanese shows, I have no idea why they kept making the actors who can't speak English, speak English. In Shin Godzilla, Satomi Ishihara's character is supposed to be a special envoy for US President (IIRC the character grew up in the US), and her deliveries totally broke the immersion. The funny thing is that the other Japanese native characters who didn't grew up in the US, delivered more convincing English lines than hers. Japanese directors, you don't need to speak English to look cool, it's okay for the characters to speak Japanese in Japan.
Hire a language coach, they have already been hiring dialect coaches for decades, why not hire a language coach for a few days? (of course not, the money needs to get into Zaslav's pocket)
This is a common trope in anime, and it kills the immersion. Like, some girl (typically named "Elizabeth" or "Claudia"), who is British, but is now attending a school in Japan due to some foreign exchange program or something, speaks fluent Japanese but super broken English, but everyone is impressed regardless.. Or even worse, when they're supposed to be an English language teacher but still speak very broken English with a thick Japanese accent.
BTW, here's a pretty cool video everyone in this thread should check out: How English Sounds to Japanese People
I’ve also seen instances where you have a Chinese character with Chinese dialogue played by a native speaking actor, but whoever wrote the dialogue is not a fluent speaker so it sounds like something a 5-year old would say.
Or the flipside of that: the foreigners in “Squid Game” whose English dialogue sounded like it was written by someone who’d taken a couple years of English in high school and never had an adult conversation.
It didn't help that they cast people who sounded like they'd done a couple plays in high school and never had a paying acting job in the decades since.
I'm only talking about the English speaking actors of course.
Have you watched Warrior? I'm very curious how well the various actors speak their Cantonese (?) lines. The characters are all supposed to be born in China (except for one, who only speaks Cantonese despite being born in America). Most of the dialogue is spoken in English, but we're shown that they're actually speaking Cantonese when non-Chinese people are in the scene. So, most of the characters have to speak Cantonese lines at some point, but I think only a couple of them are actually fluent in Cantonese. There are English-Japanese, Canadian-Vietnamese, Indonesian, and some other combinations that are not Chinese.
IIRC I only watch the first 2 episodes, and if memory serves me right, the side characters speak fluent Cantonese, but the main character not so. I can't remember much.