Tintin Forums

After all, in films foreign officials when left to their own devices speak English;

That is not the intention (unless a particulary bad film). They are not meant to be speaking English,
it is just being translated for us.

Its like when you have, for example, a Biblical film like The Ten Commandments. Everyone speaks "English" - of course the filmakers are not proposing that people in Ancient Palestine really spoke English (with American accents!), rather it has been in effect "translated as they speak".

I suspect this is the case for many of the times Tintin & Cº speak "English" - it is just shown as English for us to read (or French etc. depending on the translation). I would say this is why Alcazar speaks "properly" at home - he is really speaking Spanish.

There is one case at least where there is language difficulty - when Tintin lands in Syldavia (literally) after falling out of the plane into a haycart. The two peasants only speak Syldavian.
Also Piotr Skut has very rudimentary English.

Humans are naturally adept at learning languages. It is fairly easy, once you have a 'grasp' on another language, to make yourself understood (even if your grammar is awful). It is not that unlikely that Hergé's characters could communicate basically with one another.

Maybe Hergé could have shown what the characters sounded like speaking a foreign language badly, but he probably either left that out, or didn't think of it.

As regards Abdallah, how many times do we actually see him talking English (or equivalent) to Tintin, Haddock etc, ie other English speakers. I can remember him saying things like "Blistering Barnacles fall down again" to the Captain which sounds like beginners English to me. I think of when he talk to his dad (the Emir), or whenever else he talks 'properly', then he is really speaking Arabic (in this I include the scene with Müller in Land of Black Gold where he talks quite extensively - Müller, living in Khemed, would have known Arabic).

I'd not be surprised if someone in those worlds knew or had connections to people who spoke English and/or French. At the beginning of the 20th Century French was the international language; in the latter part it was English.

Not to mention that body language and inference are a fine way to cross language barriers!

Often wondered about the language problem myself. For instance when Haddock says to an arab woman "why can't you speak English like everyone else" in 'The Red Sea Sharks', how does this appear in, say the Icelandic version?

Darren :
For instance when Haddock says to an arab woman "why can't you speak English like everyone else" in 'The Red Sea Sharks', how does this appear in, say the Icelandic version?

Unfortunately I don't have the Icelandic version, but in French Haddock says "Pourriez pas parler français comme tout le monde", which is pretty much the same as the English except for the language reference.

As I mentioned in a previous post, English and French are known by large portions of humanity (especially in the Mid-East). That language reference is also imaginable. But what if the language of the series was not written in one of the 10 most widely-spoken languages in the world, like, say, Slovene?

Well, that was the point I was trying to make with Icelandic.

If I was doing the Slovenian/Icelandic etc translation I would either make the Cpt. say something else, or else make him say 'why cant you speak french' and include a footnote saying the originals where in french.

Moderator Note: See also How many languages could Tintin speak?