Friday, December 05, 2008

Accents

You'd think that Malaysia having so many American shows on TV would make me more attuned to their accents. But embarrassingly, I recently discovered that I'm so not!

Met a guy who grew up in the States and I think half the time he talks, I have to go, "What?"... a few times... that's awful! Maybe I'm too finely tuned to the British accent, with its singsong Northern accents, its clipped Southern accents... and its sexy Scottish and Irish accents :P that the Americans slurring their words together are just too difficult for me catch. Doesn't help that my eyes are automatically drawn to the Malay subtitles onscreen either.

Damn those subtitles!

Talking about subtitles, I can't believe Quantum of Solace was subtitled entirely in Malay! For such a popular film, and in a country with loads of non-Malay speakers (foreign students, tourists)... how could they completely forego the English subtitles (I'm talking about the scenes with non-English speech)? Aren't we trying to boost our tourism? If we want the tourists, why do we alienate them? I don't think we're at all on par with France who have everything in French, are we?

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