Entertainment

I remember watching Batman Begins, and Christian Bale dropped an awful line in Mandarin but pronounced some words like Cantonese (he butchered "I'm not a criminal" into "I'm not a rice wheel / cloud"). I'm always amazed that how much are the actors getting paid, yet can't afford to hire a language coach or just some random person from Chinatown to be on set and help them rehearse just one line of sentence that has 5 words in it (我不是犯人)

I'm reminded of this because, I was watching season 2 of Fringe yesterday, in one episode, Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) claimed that he could speak some Cantonese, and he indeed spoke a couple of okay Cantonese lines in that episode, he didn't sound like native, but it's believable enough as a character who needed to learn the language to do some shady dealings in the past. The lines were not butchered or sounded exaggerated, and I don't think Joshua Jackson himself was getting paid in millions while filming Fringe.

It's even more jarring when Hollywood hires Asian actors to do lines in Asian languages that are not their native languages. I've heard this quite often, when they hire a Korean actors to speak Mandarin / Cantonese, and they sounded awful.

Also, in Japanese shows, I have no idea why they kept making the actors who can't speak English, speak English. In Shin Godzilla, Satomi Ishihara's character is supposed to be a special envoy for US President (IIRC the character grew up in the US), and her deliveries totally broke the immersion. The funny thing is that the other Japanese native characters who didn't grew up in the US, delivered more convincing English lines than hers. Japanese directors, you don't need to speak English to look cool, it's okay for the characters to speak Japanese in Japan.

Hire a language coach, they have already been hiring dialect coaches for decades, why not hire a language coach for a few days? (of course not, the money needs to get into Zaslav's pocket)

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.

Probably true for most languages. The one that bugs me is when they hire a Chinese-American actor to speak Mandarin but the actor doesn’t actually speak Mandarin fluently or speaks it with such a thick accent that I stop being able to believe the character is from China.

It's Always Sunny did a pretty great use of a character taking some kind of brain enhancing chemical and learning Mandarin almost overnight. In real life, it was all gibberish, but someone fluent in Chinese would probably let it slide because movies/TV never actually get Chinese fluency on screen. And then later on it's revealed that it actually was gibberish in the show, too, and the Chinese speaking person was just humoring the idiot who thought he was becoming smart.

Swedish used to be misrepresented, but now Swedish actors have become more prominent and they can at least pronounce their native lines correctly. That being said, even a Swedish actor sometimes fails to point out translation errors, which I find amusing.

Also, ostensibly Swedish characters with non-Swedish names is weird. A couple that spring to mind:

• Kurt Hendricks (John Wick)
• Dieter Stark (The Lost World: Jurassic Park)
• Solomon Eddie (Minority Report)

All the time, and at least for Europe, it seems that the further east you go, the worse it is. I suppose it's a bit justified since the pronounciation is very difficult for your standard English speaker - especially for slavic languages or languages with slavic influences.

Dutch probably makes sense to be in this category too, with its pronounciation quirks. I'd imagine it would be similar for Danish as well?

It's a bit unfair to expect actors to learn languages up to the native level in the relatively short time of making a movie. Unless they're already a speaker of the language, going to almost native levels takes a huge anount of time. It's also not fair to compare with non-natives speaking English since the exposure to English is quite larger in media people consume than other languages, I think.

I can't count the number of movies with a scene in Paris, and the extras with one line of text have a thick american accent.

Terminator 2 - No problemo

A very clear example for me is Gustavo Fring from Breaking Bad. The character is supposed to be chilean and lived in Chile for a good portion of his life, yet his spanish is atrocious. Huge contrast with Lalo, whose actor is actually bilingual in spanish and english, and therefore speaks both languages fluently.

I also remember watching a yt clip of Jim Cearrey speaking Korean. I think it was from the Yes movie. My K-drama fanboy self thought he did a good job from the shows ive seen, but actual koreans in the comments were clarifying his accent was kinda weird.

It's extremely frustrating to me as a native Russian speaker (just commented about this in another thread), since Hollywood looooves Russian villains but hates hiring Russian actors. I actually could not watch later seasons of Stranger Things because of this. I've lived in the US my whole life and am now way more fluent in English than Russian, but chose to watch some episodes in Russian because it was way more bearable.

And Heisenberg switching from German to English midsentence (background to foreground), which makes no sense whatsoever.

I noticed a really weird variant of this while playing one of the RE Revelations games. From what I remember, the game was set on some fictional island that was supposed to previously have been under Russian or Soviet control, and one of the collectables was a coin with some text that was very badly translated and typed in a Japanese font (these usually have Cyrillic support, but the characters are drawn weirdly, like they're all borrowing from a copy of a copy of some early 20th century book). Then I heard a radio recording in the game, and it was in perfectly-understandable and well-spoken Russian.

So they got a good Russian-speaking voice actor for the game, who presumably could talk to the script-writers and figure out what he was actually supposed to say, but they didn't have anyone else to run the game's graphics through.