this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Entertainment

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(Mis)representation of language in Hollywood movies (beehaw.org)
submitted 1 year ago by Pantoffel@beehaw.org to c/entertainment@beehaw.org
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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?

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[–] nieceandtows@programming.dev 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For all we know, Oppenheimer spoke the same ‘fluent’ Dutch in real life too. People would only see him talk fluent Dutch because they didn’t speak Dutch.

[–] AnarchoYeasty@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does anyone actually speak fluent Dutch? Is it even possible to speak fluent Dutch? We may never know

[–] Pantoffel@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Joost mag het weten.

[–] Pantoffel@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

While it is possible for others who do not speak the language to be sufficiently fooled into believing he spoke it fluently, it would be really weird if a university lecturer would give lectures in a nonexistent language without anyone commenting on it.