Rant of the Week

Ze Problem Vif Ze Accent

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: 

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