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With a plethora of films about Nazi
Germany released in the past few months, a curious problem has once again
presented itself. How do you present, to American audiences, the
language of the characters in a story that is set in a foreign country?
How should the conversation between two Germans or two Frenchman sound?
Historically, there have been three
solutions:
- they speak plain English to
each other, as if it were their native tongue.
- they speak the foreign
language and the English translation is offered in subtitles along the
bottom of the screen
- they speak in English but
with an accent
There is a variation of the first
option: they speak English but with varying accents, dependent upon their
social status or ethnicity within the larger language group.
Here are some
salient points:
1. people do
not talk with an "accent" when speaking to each other in their native
tongue. They don't sound to each other like immigrants. They
don't sound somewhat comical to each other.
2. ...but
people do have accents-- peculiarities of pronunciation and rhythms native
to a particular region-- even when speaking their native tongues. So,
in one sense, people do talk to each other with accents.
3. in the
1960's sitcom "Hogan's Heroes", Schultz and Klink talked to each other with
thick, comical German accents-- the same way they talked to the English
speaking prisoners. The purpose of this was obviously to ridicule the
Germans.
4. Many
people don't like subtitles and won't see a movie that has them.
5. People like me
despise "dubbing"-- badly matched spoken English recorded over top of the
native language spoken by the actors. It looks and sounds ridiculous
because, for one thing, it is almost impossible to synchronize perfectly,
and, for another, the characteristics of the studio audio are obviously
different from the room in which the actors are filmed.
All contents copyright © 2008 Bill Van Dyk
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