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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] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Correctly pronouncing a language to the level that it's indistinguishable from a native is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) hurdles to learning a new language. It seems easy but I would wager that exclusively germanic-language speaking people are not able to properly pronounce, say, Chernobyl. (If you watched Brooklyn 99, their running joke with Nikolaj is very accurate)

To one's own ear, filtered through their own perception of the sounds they know and put together to speak the words, it sounds OK. But do try to learn to order a coffee in the local language when you go somewhere and see if they respond in English or not. This may vary between people and their background - say a Swede might pull it off in Norway. But send the Swede to Slovakia and it might be a bit more difficult. Look up the pronounciation for Gulden Draak (spelling?) if you're not Dutch and have some fun with that.

Edit: this is also why shibboleths are a thing

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

Gulden Draak (spelling?)

You are correct :)