Recently I watched a film in which Dutch actress Georgina Verbaan spoke a little Hindi. As a Dutchie I was wondering if it was ‘real Hindi’ or just as weird a concoction as ‘actor speaking Dutch’ usually is in films and series. So I asked my sister in law. Her mother language is Tamil, but she also speaks Hindi.
So I showed her the clip. ‘Yeah we can vaguely call that Hindi’, she said. So I think it is safe to say she made a good effort, but the Hindi is about as bad as the language they dare to call Dutch in American tv-series.
One of the first times I was baffled by what was supposed to be Dutch was an episode of Friends (the one with two Monica’s). Someone uttered a sentence to Monica and I had the same reaction. ‘What the hell did she just say?’ I had to rewind the tape (yup, thàt long ago) about 5 times. And I still didn’t get it. It was supposed to be ‘Mag ik deze dans van u?'(May I have this dance?) but the emphasis was on all the wrong words and within those words on the wrong syllables.
To top that one, someone called Suzanna Voltaire thought she could play Dutch in the episode with all the football by adding some very weird accent that holds the middle between French and having something stuck in your throat. That American woman obviously never came within a 100 foot of a Dutch person.
If you want to know what a Dutch accent sounds like, just listen to Melissandre say ‘For the night is dark and full of terrors’. That’s a Dutch accent.
To be honest, they did get better: in the episode where Ross speaks Dutch to Gunther I could actually follow what they were saying. But one sentence didn’t make sense: ‘My mother only speaks Dutch’, a woman said. There is no such person. Dutch people speak English (however poorly some might) and some French. And that goes for people who still live in the Netherlands…
Now that there are more and more Dutch actors and actresses working in Holywood I would have expected that the use of so-called Dutch in tv-shows word improve considerably, but no. A couple of weeks ago were watching Designated Survivor where someone uttered a barely recognizable sentence that was subtitled with speaks Dutch. ‘No he doesn’t’, was our reply. It was supposed to be a translation of ‘I’ve got her’. But translated to Dutch it means ‘I’ve got hair’, or it could mean ‘I caught her’. But ‘Ik heb haar’ doesn’t mean anything like ‘I’ll take care of her, I’ll make sure she gets home’. Leave alone the fact that the accent was all wrong.
How difficult can it be to ask a Dutch person to ask ‘is this correct? Does that mean what we want to convey’? I’d be happy to do it and I’m sure one could also hire some real live dutch person who already lives in the United States. Just don’t ask Paul Verhoeven, he’s been there for so long, his Dutch sounds almost weird enough for a Friends episode.
Kim in de pen blogt 