Entertainment

4594 readers

1 users here now

Movies, television and Broadway.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

Anime and Manga

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

(Mis)representation of language in Hollywood movies (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] nieceandtows 8 points 1 year ago (3 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.

[–] [email protected] 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.

load more comments (2 replies)