I started watching a series on Max last night entitled “The Swarm.” It is an ecological catastrophe, set in locations around the world: Canada, England, France, Italy, Japan, South Africa, Belgium(?), with a large cast of characters. Central to the action so far are scientists, my people, and I have no complaint about how they are being treated as they are being treated maybe a bit better than we deserve, but I do have a complaint.
To see if others had the same complaint, I searched the Internet for complaints about the show, and a cursory inspection of some of those didn’t show anyone with the same gripe I have. Interesting.
My gripe is that when people with different mother tongues get together, they speak English. This I can hear and read in the CC. The Canadian characters speak English, although one First Peoples character speaks his native tongue to other members of his community.
My gripe is that when characters of the same country get together they speak their native languages: Italians speak Italian, the French speak French, and so on which is absolutely expected … and my bitch is that there is no translation. The language settings are “English w/ English CC.” That’s it.
When viewing foreign made films, my preference is to hear the native tongues and read the English translations. I am not a big fan of stuffing English into the mouths of people speaking a different language. But I have lost maybe 20% of the dialogue so far as I am not a polyglot. (I speak a little German and Spanish, read a bit more, but the characters speak so fast that I can only pick up a few words.)
Do any of you have this same problem with “The Swarm”? The lack of similar gripes in my cursory Internet search suggests that maybe this is a Max production problem and that earlier viewers didn’t have this problem. Also I pondered that this may be an experiment to show folks how others feel when not adept in your language.
Uncommon Sense 