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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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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.