Vijf domme manieren hoe films met talen omgaan

RDJ134 26 augustus 2010 om 17:31 uur

Mensen die veel films en series kijken weten ondertussen dat honden mensen taal kunnen verstaan, en anders om. Buitenaardse wezens gewoon Engels verstaan en spreken, en vooral Britse accenten in de oudheid gesproken werd. Een mooi voorbeeld hier van is de recent verschenen Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010). Ook de website Cracked.com is dit niet ontgaan en hebben vijf van deze taal cliché's op een rij gezet.

Star Wars does the exact same thing for a number of characters: Chewbacca, R2D2, Lando's weird little copilot.

They roar or beep or mumble gibberish and their English-speaking companions understand perfectly and speak English back to them. Han Solo in particular seems to understand every alien language out there, including Wookie-talk, Greedo-talk and Jabba-talk, which seems a little out of character since he doesn't seem like the type to listen to Rosetta Stone while flying around the galaxy. But fuck if he's going to talk to them in their own language. He's a space American and you're going to listen to him in space English or go home.

Since explaining universal translators can be such a headache, some scriptwriters just have everyone actually speak English. In the Stargate TV series, most of the aliens they visit via Stargate speak English. They are often humans, but usually humans that were sent out to those planets thousands of years ago before English was invented. Even odder, the TV series directly continues the plot line from the Stargate movie where the Earth team's attempts to figure out the extraterrestrials' language (ancient Egyptian, sort of) is a pretty big deal. In some episodes, the aliens continue to speak alien Egyptianese occasionally, and then sometimes suddenly switch to English, for no apparent reason. (Well, no story-related reason. Obviously feeding actors fake Egyptian lines for an hour-long episode is tiring!)





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