Accents in place of foreign languages?

Ugh I do this myself...I wish I knew how to stop. My wife likes to find new British shows I'll like so she can laugh at me being unable to drop the accent..and slang...why do I pick up slang?

Wow, that is SO not true. I don't think you can say that even in Ontario and Quebec where the majority of the population live, and certainly not in the western provinces.

My husband's family on his dad's side is French-our last name is Paradis-but he doesn't speak a word of it. We pronounce it Paradise, not Paradee.

It depends on the context, really. I think it'd be out of place in a "realistic" grim and gritty kind of setting, but it's almost a requirement for cinematic pulp.

Originally Posted by eltonio This is over the top mental slavery.

I know this is some kind of irony, but check out what this link netted me:

You're telling me! Welcome to the story of my life. And the damn PlayNC store STILL insists on defaulting me to EU versions of CoH merchandise, even though they're completely incompatible with the version of the game I actually own. Ugh...

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Actually, most of them don't. Approximately 2/3 of the population speaks English only.

I read the whole thread, but I want to focus on this quote in particular, because it's very much exactly what I was getting at. Ideally, I WOULD prefer subtitles over dubs, but that wasn't really my point. More, I meant accents to denote nationality vs. NO accents at all, proper English. The complaint above is something I kept hearing as a complaint levelled against the next-gen Prince of Persia - the Prince (who wasn't a prince) sounded nothing like what someone from that time period should sound like. "These trousers were nuu!"

Then again... WHAT time period? It's never said, and as far as I can tell, the whole thing takes place in a completely alternate time line. And even if it WERE ancient Persia (or wherever, it's not specified), he wouldn't be able to speak English AT ALL, partly because he's half the world away from the British Empire, and partly because the English he was speaking wouldn't exist for, like, hundreds of years, accented or not accented.

Here's my biggest beef - accents are a horrible cop-out. We're already making a leap of logic by giving these people who have no business knowing or speaking English the ability to do so. But here's the thing - we're passing off English as their PRIMARY language. We're saying "OK, this guy is speaking Arabic, but since you probably don't, we'll have him speaking in English and just pretend it's Arabic, OK?" But that's the big thing - accents don't happen in people speaking their native language. You could make an argument about dialects, I guess, but a person growing up speaking his own language does not have an accent. People speaking a FOREIGN language have accents, because they speak another language with the pronunciation of their own language.

For instance, I can't speak proper English as the book says. I mean, I do my best, but I just out and out CAN'T. Spending 6 months in the UK back in 2007 gave me a bit of a leg up on certain more common words, but by and large I just can't get a lot of sounds right. "R," in fact, is the BIGGEST thing Slav language speakers can't get right, because ours is just hard and always the same in every word. So I speak English with an accent, obviously, and quite a thick one, at that. But I don't speak Bulgarian with an accent, because that's what I grew up speaking. As a native speaker, I obviously use a lot more jargon and shorthand than the literary language really calls for, but I don't have anything which could be considered an accent.

And yet if I were turned into a movie character for English-speaking audiences, chances are I'd be depicted speaking English with a Russian accent, even though my command of my native language would be... I don't want to say perfect, but let's say "not accented." Again, like in Allo' Allo'. Everyone in the show actually speaks English (and are British actors), but when characters speak "English," they speak with a British accents, while the Germans speak German as English with a German accent and the French speak French as English with a French accent. OK, I get that - we need to differentiate between the languages. But when a game or movie takes place ENTIRELY in the same language, why even put accents in there? Are the stereotypes THAT important?

Look at things from the other side - The Road to El Dorado. The two Spanish louts who serve as protagonists end up in South America and run across a... Mayan? Incan? Native, at any rate, city - the city of El Dorado. I've no idea what the people there spoke, but it wasn't English. Nor, for that matter, did Spanish from that age speak modern-day English, either. Yet everyone is able to understand each other and everyone speaks fluent English. As long as you're going to ignore the language barrier, why not go all the way and just use a decent language?

I have to say this one more time, I FRIKKIN' HATE FAKE ACCENTS!!! There is no way I can overstate this. I CANNOT stand overacted, grating, culturally and ethnically stereotypical fake accents. I've turned off good movies over a bad accent. I've grabbed people's throats over a bad accent IN REAL LIFE. REAL accents I can deal with, partly because I understand the reality of it, and partly because I'm happy to see they didn't have an American fake it. But real accents only really apply to people speaking a foreign language. People supposed to be speaking their own language really have no business having an accent.

It's kind of like it says in the trope: Mexicans speaking English will sound like Speedy Gonzalez. French speaking English will sound like Pierre LePew. Germans speaking English will say a lot of "Ja!" and "Nein!" British speaking THEIR OWN DAMN LANGUAGE will always sound "jolly good." But Aliens speaking English will sound like your average American, and no-one will bat an eye. Is it because there aren't any stereotypes about what an alien (who isn't wearing a green Roman helmet) should sound like, so they opt for least offensive to the ears?

I'm sorry I'm ranting about this so much, but this is the BIGGEST problem I have with any media that has voiced speech. At least movie dubs tend to ignore nationality, so for instance anime dubs have English speakers speaking English like English speakers without trying to invent an accent that never existed. Even when a Japanese character is supposed to have a Japanese dialect, they replace that with an American dialect (usually Deep South for some odd reason). It's only when a work is produced in not-really-foreign-language that the fake accents really come into effect.

And, to be a bit more on topic, I LOVED LOVED LOVED the I11 Ouroboros trailer. Loved it! I don't know who they got to voice Mender Silos, but that man did an outstanding job. A strong voice, clear speech, commanding presence, and someone wrote him a pretty cool script. The characters in the CoV promo trailer aren't bad, either, though the Darth Vader with metallic echo voice on Recluse is a bit cliché. And with little to no voices in the game, we avoid every character sounding like Xardas (damn Gothic II). I've yet to see what BioWare do with the Star Wars MMO, because they promise big. But in general, I'm just worried about voice acting in City of Heroes specifically, because I can GUARANTEE it would easily DOUBLE the silliness we already have, and for a humourless git like me, that's be horrid.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

It works both ways. I see more and more foreign language signs here in central PA of all places. Apparently it's becoming popular to speak your native language wherever you go.

Yes. Isn't this obvious? YES, the stupid and unrealistic accents are necessary. If there were no accents, people would say, "Oh, that was unrealistic because they were all speaking perfect English." and sales would suffer. That's just the way people are. Not all of them, but enough to murder the sales figures for any game or movie that tried it.

Well of course Canadians don't count, silly. Canadians never count.

I think, but I'm not sure, that according to the story lore, NO ONE spoke French as their native language by that time. I remember Picard getting upset when Data referred to "an obscure language known as French" in an older episode. God...I'm a dork.

I vote for voice synthesizers--a sort of combination of Stephen Hawking and Optimus Prime. Who says they even have lungs/vocal cords/tongues capable of human speech?

Of course they can speak. Why else would they be gesticulating during their monologues in the cut scenes?

--NT

That's one thing I liked about the Star Wars sequels (which isn't as big in the prequels, because people forgot how to read between Episode 6 and Episode 1, apparently) were the one-sided dialogues, with captions for the alien language. One thing I've always HATED in movies was when characters would narrate dialogue we can't hear or understand. Like a character talking on the phone would be like:

"Yes. You're saying if I don't get the TPS report done on time I'm fired? OK, sir, I'll get it done on time. What? And I can't take any breaks? Oh, but... And you're confiscating my key to the executive restroom? But, sir... OK, I understand. I won't leave my cubicle."

Who talks like that?!? Yes, it's a phone conversation. I'm not SUPPOSED to know what the other guy is saying! If it's THAT important, play the messages in the movie and leave a conversation that an actual, thinking human being would have over the phone. Not, you know, some kind of designated narrator, like in the oldest of comic books where random pedestrians would narrate super hero events to anyone who's willing to listen.

But what I REALLY loved was the conversations with the aliens in District 9. The aliens speak in a language that's completely incomprehensible to the audience, and they have NO SUBTITLES for any of them. Some people seem to speak their language, and the aliens seem to understand English, which leads to very one-sided conversations with a lot of missing information, but they at least FEEL like conversation.

A REALLY cool example of this, come to think of it, is from Ben 10. Six-Six and Vulcan (just roll with it, please) are doing... Something. Six-Six, an alien with a completely incomprehensible language, says something that sounds like a series of clicks and growls. Vulcan responds "Well it'd go faster if you helped out!" That just had me laughing out loud both in how well it came out and how natural it sounded for how absurd the circumstances were. And I don't mind that in my movies or games.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Could be sign language Also, they could just speak telepathically, and only gesture to add emphasis as desired. If you can't talk, using gestures becomes all the more important. So when they speak English (or let a synthesizer do it) they just continue to gesture as they "speak" out of force of habit.

You mean in text? I hate them for the sole reason that they make things hard to impossible to read. Part of it has to do with the fact that different people pronounce things differently, and not always by the book, and part of it has to do with how word recognition works in the brain, which for goes by word shape, rather than supposed sound. If the word doesn't "look" right, it makes reading it really difficult.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

It's even better when the mouth movements are entirely out of synch with the dubbed in English text. Italian is what my favorite examples were originally recorded in.

Spaghetti Westerns?

I tried writing like that for a while with some of my foreign characters who weren't extremely fluent with English. It hurts to even type it out that way. A number of legitimate authors have used the method, but you can see that as their work progresses, they grow out of the practice. Even Isaac Asimov had a character with a "southern drawl" in Foundation, but in the same book switched to just plain English for ALL the characters throughout the rest of the story and described accents either before or afterward, leaving the sound of the discourse up to the imagination of the reader.

YES YES YES! That was so very cool, and it seemed so natural, much like a bilingual conversation would be where each side spoke their "own" language.

--NT

Obviously the Rikti are incapable of speaking English then. Otherwise they'd simply learn the language. Maybe they can speak, but they do so in a register too high for humans to hear, maybe they can only bark like dogs or make buzzing sounds like an insect (something audible but not directly convertible into human speech), etc. For example, even if humans learned the language of dolphins, I doubt most of us could speak it. We can't squeak, squeal, and bark like that with our existing vocal cords. To me, "voice translator" = synthesized voice or no accent at all. Why would a translator add an accent?

I love that voice over

On the other hand, I prefer the accents, no matter how awful. Well, to a point. They can become comedic and possibly ruin the intended mood of the movie. But to look at subtitles, I have to look away from the actors. They prevents me from catching things they look at, changes in expression, or (heaven forbid) actual action. That bugs me, a lot. I'd rather see what's happening and hear what the character is saying. When they get the ability to beam subtitles into my brain, I'll like them better. I'll also probably be a slave to some government or corporate entity, and will only like movies they approve, but hey...baby steps.

Well, aside from the fact that R2D2 is apparently a jerk and a foul-mouth, I actually rather liked the concept. Unfortunately, it's sort of ruined by C3PO repeating his lines anyway. "What do you mean 'what transmission?' He's our new master, show him!" and a lot of "R2D2 says that." It was a good idea, but it seems Lucas was too afraid we wouldn't know what R2 was saying, and he didn't want to put in subtitles like with everyone else.

On the other hand, Han Solo and Chewbacca are exactly what I had in mind. "Grhuuurh!" "Yeah, tell me about it." "Ghurruh-urr!" "Hey, you watch your mouth!" I don't remember the exact lines, but Chewy has no subtitles and Han doesn't seem to feel the need to repeat his lines in the "so you're saying that" style.

On the flip side, there's something like Coco from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, who only ever says "coco" over and over again, yet everyone understands her. Giving her impossible insights is something of a running joke in the show, such that "Coco. Cocococ coco, cococo cocococococo, co-coco co." "Wow... Coco, I had no idea it was like that. This changes everything." It's funny the first few times, but when they run the joke into the ground (as they do with every joke on that show), it becomes annoying, because Coco is sort of like a Deus Ex Machina. She can achieve world peace just by saying "coco" over and over, because apparently her words hold some kind of moving message we just can't hear. In fact, I'm pretty sure she DOES achieve world peace at least once in exactly this way.

But when they're not using that running joke, it's back to good old "so you're saying that." It's all over the place. "Cococo!" "So you're saying you're afraid of flying?" Ugh! Make up your mind, damn it! Do you want us guessing what she said, or are you going to repeat! This schizophrenic back-and-forth is irritating!

But, yeah. District 9 with the bugs and Han Solo with Chewbacca are about the only instances of decent one-sided dialogue I can think of. I've probably heard a few instances of one-sided phone conversations, but those are usually played for mystery, because the movie wants to HIDE what the other guy said or who he is. It's like movie makers are afraid to leave people guessing what the person on the other end of the line said, even if it DOESN'T FRIKKIN' MATTER! So either it's revealed later or it's narrated. Ugh... We're not idiots. If we have enough context, we can guess the parts that matter and ignore the parts that don't.

In fact, I've made it a point to observe MY end of the line when I speak over the phone, especially over a cell phone. I'm not averse to speaking in public, but I make sure that my end of the conversation is ambiguous enough that no-one listening to me has any idea what I'm talking about.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.