this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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(Mis)representation of language in Hollywood movies (beehaw.org)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.