Red Planet (2000). Producers ran $100 short.

Just watched the subj movie. The plot is cheesy and technical details in film are laughable, but that is not why I write this.

It is, yes you guessed it right, another example of a bad Russian language in a Hollywood film. I know, i know. You are probably tired hearing my complaints on the topic but this one is REALLY outrageous.

As the story evolves, the crew is stranded on a planet with no means to go home except for old Russian mineral probe, which was unable to return to Earth automatically, but can be kick-started manually. And on the way to their only hope of survival crew members go in jokes of how this vessel is crap because it was made by silly "russky". (Jokes on them, plan worked, happy ending, bitches).

What really pisses me, is that producers of the film can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on CGI, and fail to invest $100 to language-proof one of the main plot devices. This level of negligence is staggering.

Starting with the audio interface of the probe's control system (WTF is this doing there anyway? The probe is designed to be unmanned) that speaks in horrendous 3rd generation emigrant accent. And ending with unreadable text strings on screen that are composed of random letters, some of them even are not in a Russian alphabet.

 

 And  where they got words right, they put them upside-down, like at the green button below.

 

Some can do it.

Well, well. As many of you correctly pointed out, I should not  have been all negative babbling how badly Russian language is portrayed in English video production. There is indeed a bright exception to generally practiced ignorance of proper articulation of foreign languages.

Here and now, I present you...
Ksenia Solo

Few times she speaks Russian in "Lost girl", she does it next-to-perfect. Thanks to Slavic origins.


Ain't she cute?  Personally, I like her character, Kenzi, much more than the protagonist (Bo) in the said show.

russian-in-english

I've decided to start a series of posts about use (or, rather, misuse) of Russian language in English media, specifically in movies and tv shows. This one is the first of a kind and all of them will be tagged "russian-in-english".

Our first item comes from "Sanctuary" - a very fine piece of science fiction known for its low budget CGI, but otherwise nice. Apparently, there is a lost Russian vessel frozen in ice somewhere in Barents Sea and the crew went crazy and shot each other, but not before putting a strange label on the white "first aid kit" box you see on the left side of the screen. The weird part is that they decided to transliterate from English instead of translating! So yeah, the sign actually says "first aid kit", with all Latin letters replaced with Cyrillic ones of similar sounding.

Sanctuary US S04E07 "Icebreaker"

Nikita S02E09 "Fair Trade"

The second one comes from the latest revision of "Nikita", the show that is riddled with horrible "russky" voicing. Russian voice actors are so bad there, I usually have trouble understanding what poor background characters are trying to say. Anyway, this time filmmakers did pull their shit together and gave a good try to produce a single episode without a fuck-up. Well, they almost did it. Dreadful "russian" speaking is still there, but at least they got most of the signs right. Except for the one on the picture (it is off by a single letter!), of course. Better luck next time, people.