What about that movie about a Russian submarine with a Scottish captain?
5 Likes
You know what they call that special cast they put on a broken foot?
1 Like
Also for when youâre running low on tea.
1 Like
For me, just like with Cary Grant, I just accepted this is how Sean Connery talks and didnât worry about it⌠Except, thereâs that scene where Alec Baldwin impersonates Sean Connery, using a Scottish accent of course. That was awkward.
Iâm hopelessly devoted to Pu-ehr tea.
We can both agree that original language + subtitles is better for preserving the correct mood, but the rest of what youâre saying I canât wrap my head around.
Movies dubbed in German (or movies shot in German) never use foreign accents, except for some rare cases where the language is supposed to be foreign to the character speaking it, and the characterâs native language is not translated.
Translation means that one language gets replaced by another so that you can understand it. Of course itâs wrong for the German crew of Das Boot to speak English, just as itâs wrong for Captain America to be speaking German in the German dubs. If you watch or read the Lord of the Rings, you might notice that itâs all wrong, because most of the characters arenât really speaking English, theyâre actually supposed to be speaking Westron. And of course, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, they most certainly didnât speak English (or German). Itâs just been translated.
We put up with those things, because when we hear our own language spoken we usually arenât surprised. Also, not even Tolkien was enough of a language geek to write an entire book in a made-up language.
But what if we add a non-native speakerâs accent to the mix? How does that make anything better? Iâm just imagining Captain America speaking German with an American accent. Heâd be pure laughing stock.
When do people in real life speak a language with a non-native accent? It means they have either learned it as a foreign language and are just using it to communicate with people from different cultures, or they have moved to a different country after adolescence. When you hear an entire roomful of people speak English with a German accent to each other, then that means you have just stumbled into a language practice session. Otherwise, theyâd have switched to their shared native language!
And it gets completely strange when there are kids involved. By the time young kids have learned a second language well enough to say whatever comes into their minds, their accents will be hardly noticeable.
When I first saw that movie, they were speaking German on both submarines 
1 Like
Or Braveheart with an Australian accent.
(In reality Mel Gibsonâs character William Wallace - if he spoke English at all - heâs the sort who would kill you for speaking English - would have spoken it with a Norman French accent.)
(And William Wallace wasnât known as Braveheart. That was a different guy.)
How about names? What I think is especially comical is the dubbing of 1950s-1960s Japanese monster movies into English. Not only do they have the Japanese speaking American English, they often give them names like âBillâ or âSallyâ under the idea that viewers couldnât handle Japanese names.
The Tolkien example is a little different because he obviously did think about what the translation meant and working-class hobbits like Sam are written as speaking in a different dialect than upper class ones like Frodo. A similar thing happens in films/TV shows set in ancient Rome. Typically the upper-class people speak the formal British RP dialect and the lower class people speak various working-class or American dialects.
1 Like
In the case of Das Boot, itâs because they were the same actors - everyone was bilingual and even the German was dubbed after shooting - the gyroscopes on the cameras would have been audible, so it was shot silent.
6 Likes
I know what you mean. Been drinking pu erh since I was kid; it was my dadâs go-to (go-tea?). He also loved lapsang souchong but that is not often a tea I crave. Heâd keep the tea brick(s) in our basement in a big tin, and break off a bit once a week for the kitchen. The wrappers always had 100% Chinese writing on them, and the shelf-life of those bricks was unreal. I wish coffee beans wouldnât lose their flavor in storage, but I have yet to see a coffee brick (even those vacuum-sealed in mylar pouches) that was able to stand up to a year or three or ten on a shelf.
5 Likes
That sounds so good! Do you have places you like for ordering. Weâve gotten a brick occasionally.We mostly get Numi Emperorâs Pu-ehr bags ⌠very happily. Itâs so wonderful.
1 Like
4 Likes
We should definitely have a tea thread!
3 Likes
Numi has tasty tea, and I love their ethics.
Dad used to go to various Chinese/Asian groceries in St. Louis (MO) and Chicago (IL) and chat up the proprietor, in either Shanghainese or Mandarin. After some lengthy schmoozing the proprietor would invariably go to the back of some office part of the store, away from all the stocked and shelved stuff, and bring out these grungy beat up cardboard boxes with tea bricks in them. No slick packaging, zero English on the labeling.
I usually buy my tea hit and miss at whatever Chinese (or Asian) grocery that has a nice big tea section. I confess I have a soft spot too for jasmine tea and lychee tea, found in alongside the selections of pu erh.
Movies (ok ok really just TV documentaries) starring⌠pu erh!
http://english.cntv.cn/program/documentary/20120915/104251.shtml
(part one)
http://english.cntv.cn/program/documentary/20120916/103948.shtml
(part two)
http://english.cntv.cn/program/documentary/wuyitea/index.shtml
(Wuyi tea, kinda oolong not pu erh)
Subtitles in English.
3 Likes
Thank you for making this the best Monday morning evar!! 
2 Likes
Donât thank me yet. I hope I havenât wrecked your productivity for the dayâŚ
2 Likes
Starting the day out on the BBS is wrecking ones productivity for the dayâŚ
4 Likes
You started it off great â kineahora 
2 Likes
Interesting. Didnât know that. But they wouldnât have done that if it hadnât been a match for the âaccent expectationsâ for English dubs.
For comparison, Schwarzenegger never got to speak in the German dubs of his own movies, as he has acquired a strong American accent on top of his southeastern Austrian dialect.
Thankfully, they donât change names in translation. They might be mispronounced now and then (for English names, this has become better⌠but there are a few dubbed movies that feature a certain âQueen Elithabessâ).
Basically, the illusion is that the characters are still who they are, and speaking their own language, and that the viewers just happen to understand them so well that they donât even notice theyâre speaking a different language.
An interesting side effect of that is that when the characters encounter some foreigner on screen and ask, âDo you speak English?â, then that is usually translated in some way that doesnât mention the name of the language (âDo you understand me?â, âDo you speak my language?â, etc.).
Which always gets completely lost in German dubs. Part of the reason is definitely that working class/rural dialects of German are not entirely mutually intelligible. I also think that the geographic distinctions are stronger and the class distinctions are weaker.
A notable exception is the German dub of the French film Bienvenue chez les Châtis. A large part of that movies plot and jokes revolve around a local dialect of northern france. The translation just uses a made-up dialect. Using any of the harder-to-understand real variants of German would not have made any sense.
2 Likes
Itâs interesting how much your dialect and accent says about you in the UK. As GB Shaw said, âIt is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.â I think thereâs a sense that your acceptance in a community is determined by your accent more than other factors like skin colour or even cultural markers like clothing.
My first German teacher had an accent that was a bit stronger than this woman, which made her German fairly unique:
2 Likes
