Bad accents of "foreign" characters in "native" dialogue [duplicate]

Bad accents of "foreign" characters in "native" dialogue [duplicate] - A Statement Of Words

I am currently watching Falcon and the Winter Soldier in English and as a German native speaker I stumbled a fair bit about the terrible German spoken by the supposedly German extras. They sound like English native speakers who don't know a word of German and are just trying to phonetically repeat German sentences.

I also noticed that Daniel Brühl, who is from Germany, often tries to speak Russian, which I am sure doesn't sound any better than the "German" extras.

And I am also pretty sure that all other "native" extras for other languages don't sound any better.

Now, I am quite sure that getting someone who actually speaks the language to at least dub the scene later (if you can't actually find an actor who can speak the language) is neither too expensive or too hard in a production like this with a budget of $150m. So I don't think it's about laziness or money.

Also, since there was at least one German actor on the production (and I am sure more than enough people who natively speek one of the other languages), I can't believe no one noticed.

And Falcon and the Winter Soldier is not at all alone with that issue. Almost all native English productions have that issue.

So there must be some other reason this is so common? Are native English speakers so used to bad fake movie accents that they wouldn't recognize the real accents/languages?

What am I missing here?



Best Answer

At risk of repetition - there are several similar if not identical questions on here about accents…

The answer is always "because casting can't tell the difference", so assume no-one else can either.
10 years of Game of Thrones tells us it's not only the US that does this, the Brits can torture British accents too.




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Different Nationalities Speaking English




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