29
(Mis)representation of language in Hollywood movies (beehaw.org)
submitted 1 year ago by Pantoffel@beehaw.org to c/entertainment@beehaw.org
29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Through the years I've noticed that quite a few Hollywood films play fast and loose with any other language than English.

I was watching Oppenheimer yesterday and the titular character was supposed to be speaking Dutch fluently, but the actual lines spoken were mostly jibberish, and more like German than Dutch. As a native speaker, I found this quite jarring and sloppy. Though I can imagine that to non-native speakers this would probably fly under the radar.

This got me thinking if there were more examples of shoddy translation, weird pronunciation, mishandling of language or dialect that you as a native speakers have noticed when watching movies?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] FZDC@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

It's Always Sunny did a pretty great use of a character taking some kind of brain enhancing chemical and learning Mandarin almost overnight. In real life, it was all gibberish, but someone fluent in Chinese would probably let it slide because movies/TV never actually get Chinese fluency on screen. And then later on it's revealed that it actually was gibberish in the show, too, and the Chinese speaking person was just humoring the idiot who thought he was becoming smart.

this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
29 points (100.0% liked)

Entertainment

4593 readers
1 users here now

Movies, television and Broadway.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Whom@beehaw.org
alyaza@beehaw.org
remington@beehaw.org