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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[–] rnd@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

I noticed a really weird variant of this while playing one of the RE Revelations games. From what I remember, the game was set on some fictional island that was supposed to previously have been under Russian or Soviet control, and one of the collectables was a coin with some text that was very badly translated and typed in a Japanese font (these usually have Cyrillic support, but the characters are drawn weirdly, like they're all borrowing from a copy of a copy of some early 20th century book). Then I heard a radio recording in the game, and it was in perfectly-understandable and well-spoken Russian.

So they got a good Russian-speaking voice actor for the game, who presumably could talk to the script-writers and figure out what he was actually supposed to say, but they didn't have anyone else to run the game's graphics through.