English?
its just annoying having to put the captioning on with a movie that is in "english." I couldn't understand a word they were saying....maybe i'm alone here.
share[deleted]
I don't expect to have to use subtitles for a movie that is in english. The whole movie was in dialect/slang. I didnt say they have to say the movie is in Scottish, wiseass. I wasn't asking for a solution to the problem, just if anybody else felt the movie was hard to understand....WITHOUT the captioning.
shareI watch foreign films all the time like Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Spanish and French movies, so subtitles don't bother me one bit. Therefore watching this movie with subtitles wasn't an issue. And Honestly I don't see why it should be an issue with anyone else. I assume if your watching a movie that is rated 'R' you do know how to read. So what if you have to take a little more time to skim through the words on screen to understand what they are saying.
You have to remember even though this movie is technically in English it's still a foreign film. And it's kind of tacky to be attacking the way they speak and thinking they should have gotten rid of the accents to suit the needs of people who don't understand their dialect. That is what the subtitles are for. You might as well think of this movie as being in another language and be happy they gave people a chance to understand it at all.
English or not it's a different kind of English your used to. Not all English is the exact same, it's the same with any language. I highly doubt they made the movie for people from North America. They made the movie to represent their home and where they came from and I bet they probably don't give a rats ass if people outside Britain can understand it or not.
Perhaps the less cultured viewer would say the above statement...
The British have no problem with American movies, even when they are in "slang." Most of the slang used in this movie is self-explanatory.
The reason the "British" have no trouble with understanding American movies, even when they are in "slang" is down to exposure. Over this side of the Atlantic (I'm actually Irish, not British, but the same applies to both in this case) we are used watching all sorts of American films (obviously), so we've natuarally picked up American English, slang and idioms. I still know one or two people who didn't get everything in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" though! Most of the rest of us can spot a New York accent, or a Southern drawl, or whatever without any trouble, or at least understand it.
I found the English in this film no real trouble to understand, although I don't live in Greenock (I'm ashamed to say I've never visited Scotland, even though it's only a 1hr plane journey away - I keep meaning to ;-). It's just down to exposure - if you've seen many TV programmes or films set in Scotland (with actual Scottish actors, of course) it's no trouble at all. I do remember watching a documentary on the BBC once about crofters - that had subtitles. I was about 7 years old and I needed them - some words and phrases sounded totally foreign.
You have to remember that Britain is surprisingly diverse with regards to localised dialects. It's not just a case of "English, Welsh and Scots". England has regional dialects by the dozen. Liverpool; Yorkshire; the North-East; the South-West; the South-East: they couldn't be much more different. The Welsh valleys, Snowdonia, Cardiff, Swansea - the accents there all sound different to me, not so much the slang. Scotland has Glasgow, Edinburgh, Ayrshire, the Highlands, and the Western Islands - not to mention Orkney, now that's different!
There's no such thing as "an Irish accent" either, there are many different ones. Dublin, Galway, Cork, Kerry, Donegal, Louth - we all have distinctive accents and our own vernacular.
As Oscar Wilde said: "England and America - Two countries divided by one common language". You could apply that to the regions of Britain too, and Ireland.
Best reply in this forum I've read so far. Cheers man.
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