Translation Convention / Live-Action Films

Examples of Translation Convention in live-action films.

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• Excellently deployed in The 13th Warrior where Ahmed ibn Fadlan (Antonio Banderas) is a Middle Eastern character exiled to Viking lands. Ahmed hears authentic Icelandic (initially incomprehesible to him) and a montage of scenes taking place around the evening campfire over the implied weeks of travel, more and more English words are dubbed over the Icelandic and he's seen silently mouthing words, illustrating to the audience that Ahmed is learning the local language by immersion. Once all the Vikings are heard speaking fluent English, the audience is informed that Ahmed has learned to speak and understand Old Norse. His (English) dialogue in that scene is slow and hesitant, as though it is the first time he's speaking out loud in a new language. By contrast, in the book his character spends most of the story slowly learning the language and having most things translated into Latin by a bilingual Norseman.
  • A shade of the latter appears early in the film, when the Arabs (speaking English among themselves) attend a Norse feast and the Norse speak in their own language, which the Arabic characters can't understand. They later find out what's going on when they discover a Norseman who speaks Latin, which one of the Arabs speaks, thus the translation runs Icelandic-Latin-English.
  • The use of Icelandic is itself an example of the trope, as Vikings of the time would be speaking Old Norse, but Icelandic is the best stand-in because it is the closest modern language to old Norse.
• Oliver Stone intentionally hired Irish and British actors for many of the roles in Alexander, as he wanted them to not only sound natural in their roles, but to represent the many divisions and differences in ancient Greek dialects. For example, Alexander and the Macedonians speak with an Irish accent (which Stone justifies by the historical evidence that Macedon had Celtic influence from the Gauls' passage into modern-day Turkey) while several other of his soldiers sport a variety of British accents, notably Cleitus who speaks with the actor's native Liverpool accent.
• In the 1930 and 1979 film versions of All Quiet on the Western Front, the German characters are played by American actors, who speak English without a German accent. This was to show the audiences how much the Germans were like them.
• Almanya - Willkommen in Deutschland is a German Language movie dealing with a family of Turkish immigrants in Germany. The Framing Device is the youngest family member getting told by his cousin the story of the immigration of the grandparents and their kids. Because he hardly understands any Turkish, the cousin changes all Turkish dialogue in the story into German, thus establishing the Translation Convention. The Germans' dialogue in turn, in order to illustrate the initial language barrier, is a vaguely German sounding gibberish.
• German As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me is a curious case, as there are at least three different cuts of it, applying different style of the translation convention:
  • A full-on German dub, which simply has all dialogues recorded in German, regardless of context.
  • A partial German dub, which has only the scenes that are plot-important or with the main character, Klemens Forrel, present in them, but otherwise characters have scenes in their native languages (almost always with subtitles).
  • A limit German dub, which went a step further with the Language Barrier: the dialogues Klemens could hear and understand were recorded in a mish-mash of German and whatever language the characters were talking, representing Klemens' limited understanding of Russian, and everything else was left untranslated, with no subtitles provided.
  • When the film is aired outside German-speaking countries, usually the translation operates like in the limited dub, with only fraction of the dialogues being translated.
• The Scandinavian Arn films uses a variant of this where English represents most languages aside from Swedish (the native language of the central characters) and Norwegian. Throughout the film English represents Arabic, Latin and French, to mention a few. Often an initial line or two is spoken in the intended language, and then they switch to English.
• The Brazilian film Batalha dos Guararapes features the antagonistic Dutchmen speaking perfect Portuguese just like the locals. They don't even try putting on a distinctive accent.
• In The Beast of War, Soviet soldiers speak English while Afghans speak Pashto.
• Done partially in Beowulf (2007), where everybody speaks modern English except for Grendel, who does speak Old English.
• Played straight for the most part in Captain America: The First Avenger. With the exception of the scene between the two Norwegians in the village that Red Skull attacks in the beginning of the film, most of the dialogue between German characters (i.e. Johann Schmidt (aka Red Skull) talking with Zola) is said in English.
• In Clear and Present Danger, Ernesto Escobedo and Felix Cortez speak Spanish at the beginning of the movie. They switch to English during Escobedo's batting practice.
• Used in Critters, where the good-guy aliens' speech is presented in English, even before they speed-download a datafile on Earth's native languages and culture. The carnivorous Krites' speech is in growly gibberish with subtitles, and is played for laughs when one Krite's swearing is likewise translated.
• In The Dark Crystal: In a couple scenes where the Chamberlain speaks to the Gelflings (i.e. trying to convince them he's their friend), his speech goes from cultured to halting, suggesting that he's speaking to them in their own language. The film was originally going to include artificial languages.
• Used in The Death of Stalin, where all the Soviet characters speak English. However, unlike the standard "Received Pronunciation" approach, to reflect both the multi-national makeup of the Soviet Union and the lower-class/vaguely criminal and shady backgrounds of the Soviet Politburo, each actor uses either their natural accent or a "common" accent. To illustrate, Steve Buscemi uses his native Brookyln accent for the Ukrainian Nikita Khruschev, Jason Isaacs gives General Zhukov (born in rural central Russia) a thick Yorkshire accent that could have just stepped off the moors, and Stalin himself, a Georgian, is played as a cockney.
• In Defiance, Yiddish is English with Just a Stupid Accent. Although Russian and German remain the same and are often subtitled, occasionally the main characters will speak English with Soviet soldiers, who are unlikely to have known Yiddish.
• Enemy at the Gates wavers on this. In a scene from the Soviet point of view, there is a shot of German soldiers shouting at each other in German. Later on, a German propaganda van is heard broadcasting in English with a heavy German accent. Germans and Soviets speak amongst themselves in English, but written documents we see are in Russian or German.
• An interesting example in Eternals: not only are the Eternals shown as speaking English from their first arrival in 5000 BC (unlike the humans they encounter), but Makkari's hand signals are represented as modern ASL.
• Philippine Films set during the Spanish colonial occupation of the Philippines or the 1890s–1900s-decade Philippine Revolution will often have their elite protagonists speaking Tagalog to be understood by their modern Filipino audiences (and because it would save the trouble of their actors needing to learn Spanish—which most modern Filipinos are unlikely to know beforehand—just for these roles), but in Real Life most likely they would have been speaking in Spanish most of the time, particularly to one another, since this was an elite/prestige language under colonial rule—both under Spain itself but even well into the American-colonial era after 1898; not to mention it would've been standard across the archipelago, reaching beyond the Tagalog regions, so even non-Tagalog-speaking elites from places like the Visayas, Northern Luzon or Northern Mindanao would've understood and used it. At bare minimum most upper-class Filipino natives of the era would've had a comprehensive Spanish-language education, despite the Catholic friar orders often opposing proposals to teach the colonial language to the native masses on a colonywide scale.
  • Heneral Luna (2015) is just one example. The Real Life General Antonio Luna was nearly as elite as a (mostly) native Filipino could get under Spanish rule, and other Filipino Republican politicians like Pedro Paterno and Felipe Buencamino were if anything even more elite or aristocratic than him, but where Spanish would be more expected of them, they all talk mostly in Tagalog, sans a few iconic Spanish curses.
• The 1986 Soviet film Gonka Veka (The Race of the Century) has mostly British characters all speaking Russian except in a few scenes were radio calls in English are played as voice-overs. In the onshore scenes in England, posters, newspapers, and street signs in English are seen.
• The Grand Budapest Hotel is set in Zubrowka, a fictional Eastern European country. Most of the on-screen text (signage, newspapers, documents, etc.) is in English (with several instances of German), so is the dialogue (with some instances of subtitled French), leading to the conclusion that English stands in for Zubrowkan language for the viewers' convenience.
• Makes an especially awkward appearance in the Holocaust drama The Grey Zone. The Jews are Hungarian and the guards are Germans, but everyone speaks in English. Normally we're probably expected to understand they're all speaking German, but on at least one occasion the Nazi commandant barks at prisoners who have been speaking to one another to stop speaking in Hungarian. The only indication there had been any change in the language being translated was this order.
• Guardians of the Galaxy
  • In the first movie, all the dialogue between alien characters (even the villains) is delivered in English, even in scenes where Peter Quill (aka Star Lord) is absent. This is significant because Quill does indeed have Translator Microbes.
  • In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Groot says "I love you guys" to his teammates near the end of the film. This is not him speaking English, this is us the audience finally understanding his language.
• Hangmen Also Die! is set in Prague during the occupation by the Nazis, so the characters speak Czech and German. English is used to represent Czech, whereas German is simply represented by German.
• In the Hitman movie, 47 kills the Big Bad Belikov's brother in order to lure him out to attend the funeral - Belikov's speech starts with about two lines of subtitled Russian before switching to English for the rest of it. The rest of the movie sticks with English for everyone from FSB agents to a hooker (47 is presumed to be an omnilinguist as a job requirement).
• In The Hunt for Red October, this is used to great effect. The actors playing Russians speak to each other in Russian early in the film. Then one character (the political officer) begins reading the Book of Revelation, switching to English when he comes to the word "Armageddon," which is the same in both languages. Apart from the Soviet National Anthem, the Russians all speak English at this point, but we are to understand they are still speaking Russian. Furthermore, when the Americans board the Red October, they are greeted by a Russian sailor who is speaking non-subtitled Russian. Russian-speaking characters remain without subtitles until it is established, minutes later, that Jack Ryan speaks Russian, and that Marko Ramius speaks English. They consistently keep characters using their understood/spoken languages after that point (with the exception of the Konovalov, whose crew can be assumed to still be speaking Russian even though we hear English).
  • Some have mocked that Sean Connery's Soviet submarine captain speaks with a Scottish accent during these translation-convention scenes, but this might be a case of Fridge Brilliance: it's stated that Ramius isn't Russian, he's Lithuanian...so maybe that's just a Scottish accent standing in for Lithuanian-accented Russian.
• In the Soviet film Hussar Ballad, a Russian character interacts with some French officers, while pretending to be one of them. While they're certainly speaking in French this time, the film doesn't indicate the change of language in any way. Justified, as French was very popular in Russia at the time, and this character could be speaking French flawlessly.
• An interesting question: Is this in effect entirely through the flashback narrative of Interview with the Vampire? Obviously, Louis is translating everything for Daniel's benefit, and we can assume naturally that the scenes in colonial Louisiana and Paris are in French, but what about after the Time Skip when New Orleans became American?
• Ip Man was originally in Cantonese, with the Foshaners speaking Cantonese, while Jin's Northerner troupe speaks Mandarin instead of a true northern Chinese dialect. In the Mandarin dub, both the Foshaners and the Northerners speak Mandarin. However, the Japanese characters still speak in Japanese with subtitles.
• The English subtitles for Johnny Stecchino (sometimes retitled "Johnny Toothpick") cover the entire movie, including one scene where Dante is trying to convince the hotel staff he's an American tourist by speaking in broken English.
• In Jojo Rabbit, which takes place over the last year or so of the Third Reich, the characters speak accented English in place of German. When the Allies take the town at the end, an American soldier starts yelling at Jojo to go home in English but Jojo can't understand him.
• Judgment at Nuremberg features Maximilian Schell's defense attorney speaking German for the first few sentences of his opening statement, then waiting for his words to be translated before continuing. When he gets to a more dramatic part of his speech, the camera abruptly zooms in on his face and we hear him speaking English, which he and other German characters continue to speak for the rest of the film. There aren't even any more pauses for translation, though we can assume they are happening in the "real" version of events.
  • The system of headsets and simultaneous interpreters has been explained for both the participants and the audience, and the viewer can tell which language is being spoken by which characters are wearing headsets. If Spencer Tracy, an American, is not wearing a headset, English is being spoken. If the Germans on trial are not wearing them, then German is being spoken. If both are, then it is some other language, such as Polish. The headsets and simultaneous interpreters eliminate the need for pauses.
• K-19: The Widowmaker follows the example of Red October: the characters speak Russian for the first couple of minutes, then switch to English.
• At first cleverly averted, but then played straight in the Russian sci-fi comedy Kin-Dza-Dza. The Earthling transplantees are initially confounded by the language of the titular system apparently only having one word, coo. As it turns out, the Humanoid Aliens there have a limited telepathy: with consent, they can read each others' minds, so coo is just a way of getting attention and indicating that you have something to communicate. The two (relatively) helpful aliens who take the Earthlings in use this ability to learn Russian over a handful of scenes to make things easier... but then, even when they're separated later, every alien speaks Russian instantly with no explanation.
• A rather unique method is used in the Danish-Swedish-Norwegian-German drama Hamsun about the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun. Most of the characters in the movie are Norwegian and are understood to speak that language. Hamsun himself is, however, played by the Swede Max von Sydow and his wife is played by danish actress Ghita Nørby, These two actors speak their dialogs in Swedish and Danish, while everyone else, including their children, speak Norwegian. From the perspective of the characters however, they all speak the same language.
• An especially complicated one in Last of the Mohicans. When characters who speak French are alone, it's spoken in English; the French general, who speaks English anyhow, retains a villainous French accent throughout. Meanwhile the Native Americans slide in and out of three different languages, which are subtitled as Bilingual Dialogue, while other characters don't understand, and some asides go untranslated. Magua in particular, due to being a Fish out of Water, seems to speak more languages than any other character; in the final parlay, he alone understands the whole conversation, which is both subtitled and partially translated by another character.
• In The Last Starfighter, when Alex first arrives on Rylos, he (and the audience) initially hears everyone speaking "Rylan", until Alex gets his "translator device". The Rylans speak are heard in English after that, even in scenes when Alex isn't around. An exception is Centauri (played the late Robert Preston) who already knew English when he first meets Alex. Strangely, Grig at the end of the film is able to greet the humans at the trailer park and speak with them with no problems, when it is unlikely he actually speaks English.
• This happens pretty liberally in Lawrence of Arabia, where Lawrence (and some other characters) switches pretty seamlessly between English and Arabic (and maybe Turkish). Some Arab actors are actually dubbed into English, despite their characters quite likely speaking Arabic.
• In Little Big Man Dustin Hoffman's character speaks like a hick as the aged Narrator and in the company of whites, but speaks in clearer, nobler sounding English when in the company of native Americans (presumably speaking in Sioux).
• The Man Who Killed Don Quixote: Early in the film, Spanish and English are kept concretely separate as characters speak (with varying success) in one or the other. When Toby talks to Raul in the bar, they at first speak in subtitled Spanish, but then Toby brushes aside the subtitles, and we hear the rest of the conversation in English. From there on out, most of the dialogue is in English, but there are still some brief moments of Spanish, so it's not entirely clear whether the trope is still in effect.
• The Mask of Zorro sees most of the Hispanophone characters speaking English (with white Spanish characters having an English accent). Whether white American cavalry officer Captain Love is actually speaking English or Spanish in conversation with other characters is unclear. In one scene, an elderly woman speaks in non-Castilian Spanish, which is translated through an intermediary to English for the audience and for Elena, who doesn't understand her otherwise (despite knowing Spanish). In this scene, it's possible that the elderly woman is speaking an indigenous language or a dialect of Spanish that raised-in-Spain Elena would have difficulty comprehending, and the Translation Convention is in effect for both sides.
• Memoirs of a Geisha starts out with Japanese without subtitles then converts to full English for the remaining of the film.
• The 2010 Turkish comedy Yahşi Batı (The Mild West), a play on Vahşi Batı, "The Wild West") follows two Ottoman agents tasked with delivering a valuable diamond to the US. The Translation Convention of English to Turkish is heavily lampshaded early on; after a scene entirely in English, one of the characters in the Framing Device remarks that he can't follow the story, so up comes a DVD-style options menu switching the language to Turkish and switching off the subtitles.
• In Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, the crew of the Russian submarine Sevastopol speak in English with Russian accents, while the viewer is supposed to see them as speaking Russian.
• In Moonstruck, many scenes begin with a few sentences in Italian before switching to English. This is presumably intended to indicate when the characters are actually speaking Italian.
• Ridley Scott's Napoleon is an English language production the main historical character of which (and plenty of others) is/are French.
• Night Train to Lisbon: It's unclear, though most of the time the characters are apparently not speaking English, but rather Portuguese and perhaps German in Bern.
• In Night Train to Munich, Czechs and Germans all speak English to each other.
• In Outlander, all Norse dialogue is given in English. Interestingly, Kainan speaks with Jim Caveziel's American accent, while the native Norse speakers all have English accents. Kainan's native language is shown as subtitled Icelandic (except in one Flash Back, presumably because Kainan is describing it to his Norse love interest).
• The Jeremy Sisto movie Jesus has all characters, including the title character, speak English. (Compare this to The Passion of the Christ, a trope aversion—see "Exceptions" below)
• A partial example in the short film adaptation of Papers, Please: The characters speak in Russian, however all written text, including the dozens of entrants' documents that the Inspector goes over and the "Glory to Arstotzka" banner in the back of his booth, are written in English.
• Paths of Glory is set in WW1-era France, and all the characters are members of the French military. Nevertheless, everyone speaks perfect English throughout the film.
• In The Pianist, Poles and Jews speaking Polish (and possibly Yiddish) speak English while Germans speak German.
• The Piano Teacher, a joint French/German/Austrian production, is set in Vienna and all the written text is in German, but the spoken dialogue is in French.
• In Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the Spaniards speak English even among themselves.
• The protagonist of I Am David knows several languages, but we only hear him speak English as he travels through Bulgaria, Italy, Switzerland, and finally, to Denmark. At one point, in Italy he meets an American tourist who's trying to tell him his car needs gas. The tourist his heard speaking broken Italian from his own perspective, and saying "My wine cellar needs steak" in English from David's.
• French film Purple Noon has two Americans, Tom Ripley and his enemy Freddie, speaking to each other in French.
• In The Reader, a film set in Germany, the actors speak German accented English (to the ears of the audience), but the true language they are speaking is German. This includes written text which appears to even look English.
• Titanic is a 1943 German film about the sinking of the RMS Titanic, to be used as anti-British propaganda since this was made in Nazi Germany in the middle of World War II. Watching it and hearing this quintessentially English story told in German, is a little disconcerting.
• It's to be assumed that this is in effect in Slumdog Millionaire, where all the Indian characters, including uneducated "slumdogs", speak fluent British English to each other. It should be noted, however, that by the time the protagonist (Jamal Malik) and his brother reach the age of 12 or so they can speak English well enough to communicate with American tourists who otherwise need a translator, and given that British English is everywhere in India (albeit mostly among the educated) it's not completely unbelievable that they learned English as a means to survive.
• In SpaceCamp, the robot Jinx and the NASA mainframe communicate through voice-synthesized English, even when no humans are around.
• Several James Bond movies (The Spy Who Loved Me, Octopussy and GoldenEye being the most blatant) feature Russian characters in Russia speaking to each other in English when they have no reason to. The World Is Not Enough subverts this trope. While Bond is undercover as a Russian nuclear physicist and meets Christmas for the first time, they speak for awhile in English, then she ends the conversation by saying in Russian, "Your English is very good for a Russian". Bond is naturally unfazed and replies (in Russian) that he studied at Oxford.
• Star Trek III: The Search for Spock has Klingon commander Kruge and his officers, Torg and Maltz, confer in English, but Kruge speaking in Klingon to the rest of his crew. Though whether the convention applies in full or they're actually speaking English to conceal their conversation from the non-English-speaking crew is never made clear.
• Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country uses a technique similar to Red October in places. In the trial scene, General Chang begins his arguments in Klingon, and then it cuts to Klingon translators rendering it into English, and then cuts back to Chang continuing in English. After one question, he demands that Kirk answer before waiting for the translation. Another scene of the Klingons conferring also has Chang switch to English midway through.
  • Kirk and McCoy are also shown as listening to hand-held headsets while the Klingon characters are talking.
• In the Name of the King 3: Last Mission: The film begins in Bulgaria, where everyone is speaking English in a Bulgarian accept except the protagonist, who speaks with a native speaker's accent. When the protagonist is whisked away to a fantasy universe, everyone is still speaking Bulgarian-accented English.
• In Time Bandits everyone speaks English in every location and time period.
• Played straight, subverted, averted then spanked like a naughty child in Top Secret! where East German officers speak English while the rest of the citizens speak Yiddish. A little German is thrown into the dialogue but does not make sense in context. And in the Swedish bookstore scene, the dialogue is in English...played backwards.
• Lampshaded in the 1983 Mel Brooks version of To Be or Not to Be. The actors sing/speak mangled Polish with cartoonishly exaggerated accents for the opening few minutes, then in the middle of an argument between Brooks and Anne Bancroft's characters the offscreen narrator interrupts to announce "In the interest of clarity and sanity, the rest of this movie will not be in Polish" (as the characters look around to see who's speaking).
• In The Train, both French and German characters speak English (although sometimes German "background chatter" can be heard in scenes like the one taking place in the German Army headquarters); presumably, a Wicked Cultured individual like Colonel von Waldheim would speak fluent French (especially since he's so enamored with French art) while the other German troops and French railway workers would probably have at least a working command of each other's languages after four years of occupation.
• In the 2007 Transformers movie:
  • Decepticons speak to each other in Cybertronian, subtitled in Cybertronian glyphs which morph to English. Later, we hear Megatron and Starscream speak to each other in English, but one would assume they're not really holding a conversation in the language of "insects". The Autobots, on the other hand, speak English exclusively, even to each other, as well as in Prime's broadcast to any surviving Autobots at the end, but he's probably not really. Presumably, this was all so the various voice actors would have perhaps three lines instead of Zero.
  • The Italian adaptation of Transformers offers a variation of this. Right before Megatron says (the Italian equivalent of) "You failed me yet again, Starscream", he pronounces two unintelligible words, to give the impression that he cussed in Cybertronian and pronounced the rest of the phrase in Italian. However, the two words are merely an insult in Italian ("maledetto bastardo" = "you goddamn bastard") played backwards.
• Valkyrie opens with Stauffenberg writing a letter in German as we hear his voice reading the text, which then begins to translate each line to English before switching to English entirely.
• In the original French version of Les Visiteurs - this was played in an unusual way. Jean Reno and Christian Clavier would speak modern French when they were alone, but (pseudo-)archaic French when they interacted with modern Frenchmen.
• In Warcraft, both sides speak their own language, but the side which is in focus is heard speaking in English, which sometimes causes an odd effect of someone switching a language halfway through a sentence.
• Where Eagles Dare begins with the Allied operatives in a meeting being briefed on their mission to infiltrate a Nazi stronghold. The leader helpfully reminds them, "All of you speak fluent German," which they presumably did not need to be told; it's just a line thrown in only to explain to viewers why all of the dialogue afterwards is in English.
• Where Hands Touch: All the German characters speak in German-accented English (a few words were excepted). Since the actors are native English speakers, this makes sense (though French is also spoken).
• Year One: Two hunter-gatherers and travel through a few Old Testament stories, and ancient Rome. All the while, modern English & idioms are used and there are a few scattered comedic accents.
• Planet of the Apes (1968) is a fantasy film in which the protagonist travels about 2000 years into the future and the Earth he discovers is populated with a species of humanoid Apes who speak modern English and a few humans who do not have the ability to understand or produce complex speech. The apes also use the normal modern Latin alphabet for writing.
• A somewhat jarring example in the Soviet The Suicide Club, or the Adventures of a Titled Person (adaptation of The Suicide Club short story collection by Robert Louis Stevenson). In one of the scenes, the characters decide to switch from French to English, which they do. The thing is, the audience hears no difference whatsoever, as both "French" and "English" are in fact rendered in accent-free Russian.

Exceptions

• In Jackie Chan's Accidental Spy, all characters speak the language they logically would speak. This includes English, Korean, Turkish and Russian.
• In Gibson's Apocalypto, which is about Mayans, characters speak in Yucatec Maya language.
• In Avatar, no Na'vi speaks English except when directly addressing a human.
• Similarly, in the film The Band's Visit, the Israelis and Egyptians have to converse with each other in English (and not their native languages). This actually disqualified the movie from being nominated for best foreign language academy award, due to most of the dialogue being in English.
• The Korean movie The Beauty Within has its leading male protagonist wake up every day as a different person, which leads to changes with his gender, age and nationality. This leads to several interesting cases with the languages he speaks, as while his primary language is Korean and he can understand English well enough, he ends up speaking in the language of whatever ethnicity he is at the time despite not understanding it himself. For example, when he transforms into a Japanese woman and converses with his girlfriend, he speaks entirely in Japanese while she speaks in Korean; the conversation is near flawless as it turns out she understands Japanese, but when she speaks a sentence of it back to him, he reacts in confusion despite his current ethnicity.
• Many World War 2 movies - Battle of Britain, The Longest Day, Tora! Tora! Tora!, Saving Private Ryan, A Bridge Too Far and Patton for instance - use foreign languages whenever showing German/Polish/Japanese (etc) participants. This is effective at lending the movie an air of authenticity, and tends to be common to the more "serious" movies—not to mention likely heightening the "foreignness" or "otherness" of the enemy side. Films using World War 2 as a setting for a bit of action-adventure (Where Eagles Dare) generally don't bother, even when the actors playing the Germans are actually German.
• Averted in Big Game - the Finnish characters speak subtitled Finnish between each other, while Hazar and his mooks converse in unsubtitled Arabic.
• In Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, every character they interact with speaks their native language. Of course, a few of their passengers really did speak English in real life (e.g. Billy the Kid, Abraham Lincoln, Sigmund Freud) so at least they could communicate with some of them. Although it is questionable whether they would have been able to speak with 15th century Englishmen, as the language has changed quite a bit since then.
• Bon Cop, Bad Cop is an interesting aversion - the two main characters are an English-speaker and a French-speaker, but both are fluently bilingual, and most of the supporting characters are at least close. This isn't an ancillary feature, however - many of the jokes in the film are about the language differences, and the film is divided roughly evenly between the two languages.
  • Given that it was intentionally written not to have a primary language, every line in the movie could be treated as an aversion of this trope, if one wants to think of it that way.
• Cloud Atlas: Possible aversion in "An Orison of Sonmi~451": the archivist comments on how Sonmi speaks good "Consumer", and she replies in what sounds like futuristic Korean ("subspeak"). Thus, we can infer that "Korean" exists but is viewed as the common people's parlance, whereas English (or Consumer, if English simply serves as a stand-in for the sake of storytelling) is what all the higher-class people and/or the government speak. This is akin to how Latin was used historically throughout much of Europe.
• The 1971 Brazilian film Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês ("How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman"), set in the early colonial era, has almost all of its dialogue in Tupi.
• In The Film of the Book of The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons, all foreign characters speak their own language (French, Italian, German, Latin...) when speaking amongst themselves, only switching to English when the unilingual Langdon is around.
  • And in the books, it's done rather cleverly as well: There's a scene with a young Sophie Neveu and her grandfather Jacques Saunière in The Da Vinci Code, both french-speaking... with Saunière pestering Sophie to practice English with him.
• In Dances with Wolves, the crew couldn't find a Pawnee speaker (which shouldn't be surprising as the number of native speakers left at the time would be around ten), so they substitued actor Wes Studi's native Cherokee for Pawnee.
• In the 2002 Brazilian film Desmundo, set in 1570, all of the dialogue is spoken in 16th-century Portuguese.
• Averted in District 9, all the alien speech is subtitled, even when it's clear that the alien characters understand English and the South African characters understand Prawn.
• Played oh so straight in The Eagle Has Landed, a WWII film from the Nazis' perspective, with absolutely no German to speak of. The scenes set in Germany are conducted entirely in English due to translation convention. When the German Paratroopers arrive in England, their commander instructs them all to speak English all the time in case they are overheard, thus neatly avoiding the problem of how you tell who's speaking English and who German. They dress as Polish soldiers to explain the foreign accents.
• In the Finnish-Swedish film Elina Elina: As If I Wasn't there Swedish-speaking characters speak Swedish and Finnish-speaking Finnish which is heard as Swedish and the bilingual whichever language is appropriate to the current situation. There are several situations where characters are supposed to be unable to understand each other. The background is set against the suppression of the Finnish-speaking minority in northern Sweden in the 1950s and the plot is about a conflict between a Finnish-speaking pupil and a Swedish-speaking teacher. At the same time this is a film aimed at children, so instead of having actual dialogue in Finnish (beyond a few words), the main character speaks Swedish (and only Swedish) with a Stockholm(?) accent and her mother speaks Swedish with a Finnish accent and tells her daughter to "remember to speak Swedish" in school when they haven't actually spoken any other language at all.
• Averted in Europa Europa, another film where a multinational war story is told and all nationalities involved (Germans, Polish, Russians for the most part) speak in their own languages, with English subtitles added later.
• In Firefox, nothing directly relevant to the plot is said in Russian, although Gant's thought commands to the titular plane are in Russian.
• In Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, the titular character played by Forest Whitaker speaks English and Isaac de Bankol� speaks French, and both understand each other without actually understanding each other.
• In The Hobbit: Unlike the Lord of the Rings films, when characters are amongst themselves, they speak in their native tongue, and it's not delivered in English/Westron. So Tauriel and Thranduil stick to subtitled Silvan, Azog and Bold to the subtitled Black Speech etc.
• In Inglourious Basterds all the characters tend to naturally use their respective native languages. Sometimes, they announce that are about to use English (usually for two characters of different nationalities to communicate better).
  • Sometimes, non-English scenes are left untranslated to convey the point of view of an English-speaking character. For example, in the scene where Shoshanna meets Zoller in the cafe and the German soldier comes in and speaks to him, the parts in German are left unsubtitled, since Shoshanna doesn't speak German. When you remember this, other scenes (like Shoshanna's meeting with Goebbels) are far more powerful - no wonder she's quietly terrified. It's not just the presence of Landa, it's that she doesn't have a clue what's going on because they've been speaking German throughout.
  • There's also some fun parts where the subtitles are just the spoken language, not a translation, because the spoken parts are something like "oui".
  • Not averted in the German version, where the Basterds speak German (this includes the ones that can't speak it in the English version). Furthermore, Shoshanna doesn't speak English but German instead (the scene at the very beginning is also French/German instead of French/English).
• Averted in Johnny Mnemonic, The Dragon, a Yakuza assassin, is reporting to his boss in subtitled Japanese. His boss then informs him that his Japanese is terrible, and that they will speak in English instead.
• Averted in Kill Bill, where foreign speech is subtitled, even though the Bride can understand it. In the second film, it's revealed that the Bride can understand Chinese but can't speak it well. She tries to speak Japanese to her Old Master, but the guy hates the Japanese and tells her to speak English to him instead. He continues in Chinese. In the first film, Lucy Liu's character is of Chinese and American descent but is in charge of a Japanese gang. When one of the gang bosses complains about her ethnicity, she cuts off his head and switches to English for emphasis (with her assistant translating to Japanese in the background).
• In The Film of the Book The Kite Runner, all the characters in Afghanistan speak Dari (also known as Farsi), which means that the entire first half of the movie is in Dari with English subtitles. The boys who played young Hassan and Amir actually were native speakers from Afghanistan, however some of the adult actors had to learn the language.
• In the Russian film Kukushka (Cuckoo), the three main characters are a Russian soldier, a Finnish soldier, and a Saami woman, all of whom speak in their native languages and none of whom understand one another.
• Midnight Express features several scenes where people speak Turkish without subtitles, so that we're in the same boat as the main character, who can't speak the language but is desperate to know what they're saying about him. Incidentally, the actors in these scenes are mostly speaking complete gibberish with the occasional Turkish word thrown in, so even if you know the language you're left in the dark with the character.
• In The Mummy Trilogy, all non-English speaking characters speak in their own languages accompanied by subtitles, even in the flashbacks.
• Mel Gibson averts this in the extreme in The Passion of the Christ, where the entire film is rendered in Aramaic, Latin, and also some Hebrew- all of which are subtitled. Originally he apparently didn't want to subtitle it. Some bright spark obviously convinced him that most of the viewing public would be put off by a two hour movie in which all the dialogue is in two dead languages and what's happening on screen is pretty hard to watch anyway. However, it still isn't entirely accurate. Firstly, the Latin spoken in the movie is modern ecclesiastical Latin, not Vulgar Latin that would be appropriate to the period. Secondly, the Romans shouldn't be speaking Latin anyway, since Greek was the lingua franca of the region. Gibson chose Latin because it's easier to distinguish from Aramaic than Greek. (Aramaic was in fact the main language of the Jewish people of the region, though some scholars are now claiming that Jesus spoke Hebrew.)
  • Aramaic was a Syrian language the Jews picked up during their Babylonian exile. It was therefore quite common in the Holy Land in the first century A.D., although Jewish religious ceremonies continued to be conducted in Hebrew.
• Deployed hilariously in Pokémon Detective Pikachu, in which Tim not only hears the title character speaking English, but also hears him speaking in the voice of an adult human male.
• In The Red Violin, everyone speaks the language (Italian, German, English, Chinese, and French) appropriate to the various settings, with subtitles as necessary. As a result, the film required no dubbing for different national markets, just the appropriate subtitles.
• Very unusually averted in The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming for an American film made in the 60s during the height of the Cold War — all Russian characters, even when played by Americans such as Alan Arkin, speak unsubtitled Russian when talking to each other.
• Silence a Historical Fiction film has English stand-in for Portuguese. The original novel is in Japanese but has Portuguese priests as protagonists and similarly substituted Japanese with interspersed Latin-Portuguese words for the language of the characters.
• As The Spanish Apartment involves lack of mutual comprehension between languages, the film features a mix of French, English and Spanish, all subtitled. Depending on the version of the film you watch, the brief snatches of Catalan in the film may or may not be subtitled, to help show that, unlike Spanish, the main characters can't understand it.
• In Stargate, the Abydonians always speak in their own language (a dialect of Ancient Egyptian), as does Ra. This is subtitled, but only after Daniel Jackson (the viewpoint character) learns the language.
• In Star Wars, the primary language (Galactic Basic Standard) is the only one translated to English (or whatever language the media is being dubbed into). Other alien languages may or may not be subtitled. It's also possible that Basic is identical to English, albeit written differently.
• Thor: The Dark World, Malekith and the Dark Elves speak in subtitled Dark Elf language, even amongst themselves, with only Malekith only speaking English in only two sequences: when he confronts Frigga and has Kurse murder her for not cooperating after demanding where the Aether is, and during the final fight with Thor near the end.
• In the Israeli film Walk on Water, characters speak in whatever language would be natural for the situation. So, the Israelis speak Hebrew to one another, the Germans speak in German to each other, and when together, Israelis and Germans speak English together. Subtitles are available.
• In Wings of Desire, every human speaks (and thinks) in their own language. Apparently, the angels speak German between themselves.
• In X-Men: First Class: All the scenes with the Nazis/the Swiss bankteller/former German soldiers as well as the scenes with the Russians are spoken in German, French, Spanish, and Russian where appropriate, with subtitles in English. A couple scenes use the technique of starting in foreign language, then shifting to English for the last few (and most dramatically important) lines.
  • Unfortunately, the foreign lines are usually spoken with an atrocious pronunciation, most notably the scene at the beginning.

Mixed

• The Lord of the Rings movies: The movies made a point of having characters speak in J. R. R. Tolkien's invented languages when appropriate (i.e. Elrond talking to Arwen, Arwen talking to Aragorn), with English subtitles for the 99.9% of viewers who don't speak Elvish. However, when native speakers were talking among themselves, they reverted to English. Thus Galadriel speaks to Elrond in English rather than Sindarin; the Witch-king addresses his orc minions in English rather than Black Speech; Orcs speaking with each other in English during the siege of Minas Tirath rather than in Black Speech; etc.
• None Shall Escape (a 1944 film about a trial against a Nazi officer following the end of the then-ongoing Second World War, told via flashbacks from the points of view of the witnesses at the trial): The German and Polish characters all speak English, presumably representing German and Polish, respectively. Hebrew is however left untranslated, driving home the Jews' status as outsiders.
• Steven Spielberg originally considered making Schindler's List entirely in German and Polish, but thought that subtitles would be too distracting. Therefore the film is mostly in heavily German-accented English, with scattered instances of incidental dialogue in unsubtitled German and Polish.

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