Foreign Language in an english film

H

Huy Vu

Veteran
Have you ever notice anytime Hollywood movies or TV shows feature non-english character they always speak their languague of origin in a barely intelligible manner? I was watching Monk last night and they had a Vietnamese man speaking to a nurse; his pronounciation was so rushed and run together that I could only understand every other words or so. I'm not sure if the director tells the guy to speak in that manner or if the casting guy just figured that as long as they have someone speaking a foreign language people wouldn't care.

Another example I can think of is Ultraviolet, where the gangster on the roof were speaking Vietnamese but I couldn't actually make out what they were saying until the very last line because the pronounciation was so poor.

I wish that more non-english character in an American film would speak their language of origin in a normal, clear manner. Popular languages such as Spanish or French probably suffers less from this problem, but it makes me angry to see my own language gets reduced to gibberish.
 
This happens a lot with many other cultures too and English speakers probably never know.

It happens with Arabic and Indian cultures too. Sometimes the actor is not even a native speaker of the language he represents in the movie, believe it or not!

I think it's slowly changing as the American immigrant population grows. I was surprised to see real and well known Arabic actors in "Syriana."
 
omar_ said:
It happens with Arabic and Indian cultures too.
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What about Babel? Just wondering if they were speaking Arabic correctly in Morocco. They might have, but I don't speak it so I don't know.
 
The Moroccan actors in Babel were non-actors from the villages where they filmed, so I'm pretty sure they spoke the language, albeit in their own local dialect/accent. Innaritu had a hard time casting those roles, because most actors in Morocco are of the daytime TV soap variety so they overact. He wanted naturalistic performances so he ended up using non-actors. If I recall correctly only one role was cast with an actor - can't remember if that was the tour bus guide or one of the cops that comes looking for the kids.
 
From the horse's mouth. Went to a screening with Q&A by Innaritu. if you click through the Moroccan actors' names on imdb.com you'll likely be able to see which were nonactors since Babel will be their first film credit.
 
I forget what movie it was, but a character was speaking in a foreign tongue, and then the subtitles pop up, written in that language. It's the simple things that amuse me :)
 
Hairy Lime said:
From the horse's mouth. Went to a screening with Q&A by Innaritu. if you click through the Moroccan actors' names on imdb.com you'll likely be able to see which were nonactors since Babel will be their first film credit.
Click to expand...

Wow, that's really cool. Did you get any Q's A'd?
 
The chinese dialogue during the commodity exchange in The Departed was absolutely dreadful. I might even go as far to say that the film does not deserve Best Picture just based on the performances in that particular scene.
 
Since it is meant for an american audience, I believe is forgivable. However, if a film maker wants that extra accurancy, It never hurts going the extra distance in getting actors who know both their native language and english. The reality a film sells can be horribly injured when the foreign dialogue is incoherent (especially those who know mutliple languages or are international viewers).

When it came to foreign language dialogue in my next film. I was lucky enough to have actors fluent in both English and Japanese.
 
I'm dealing with this issue currently. My next film requires actors fluent in Spanish and English, which fortunately is not very hard to find in Los Angeles. However, it's hard enough to find actors who can nail the role who speak just English, so I'm very interested in seeing how this new casting challenge plays out. Ideally, it would be Portuguese and not Spanish, but I'm not yet completely insane.

The real interesting challenge is that crucial scenes of the movie play out entirely in Spanish. I am not a fluent Spanish speaker myself. I've adopted the fatalistic viewpoint that I just need to find people I can relinquish control to. The movie will be in the hands of the actors, more than ever.
 
same here.. for my spyfest entry, i need people who speak russian. it always bothers me when on-screen russians are so terrible at it (rocky 4, that arnold movie where he's russian, that james bond flick where denise richards is russian (and a nuclear scientist, but that's a whole other discussion) .. phew).. granted there arent that many people that'll recognize proper pronounciation but i always enjoy it when they hire proper speakers for the roles
 
japanese in my feature

japanese in my feature

the film i'm making has a couple of japanese characters,
one of them mostly speaks english, but in one scene she
speaks japanese...
what i did was bring along a friend of mine to make sure that their dialogue
was natural, and understandable. luckily i know my friend well,
and can trust him. funnily enough the takes that seemed the
most natural to me, usually did to him, too. (even though i know
no japanese, other than a couple of words.)

i love foreign films so couldn't resist putting in a few scenes
in another tongue than my own! Has anyone else had a similar
experience?
 
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