I could see the voice actor learning a sentence or two but on occasion the bit goes on for a couple minutes. I feel like with a cartoon it wouldn’t be that hard to find a stand in who sounds close enough or use whoever does the dubbing for that language.
I once asked Chris Parnell if he knew spanish since he speaks it a lot in Archer. He said they give them phonetic lines and he doesn’t know any languages besides english.
Wow, I really thought he did because of Archer! Now I’m curious about Jon.
I totally thought so too.
If you’ve ever watched anime without dubs where they have to speak English a lot, you’d know lol. Generally IIRC they just have to sound believable enough.
Non animated example: Stargate SG1 did this once and the spoken dialogue was an inside joke., Reportedly, their Russian was terrible since they just used English-speaking extras - not that most English speakers would know. Basically just a couple of Russian soldiers on duty heard a noise, ones asks “what was that?” And the other answers something like “probably just the monster from the end of last season.” Then the subtitles have the correct dialogue.
SG-1 tries to minimize the time the leads spend faking it, but they can get a lot out of one word.
Nyet?!
Nyet?!
That episode is one of the greats.
The only example I personally encountered “in the wild” was Disney’s Tarzan, where Phil Collins insisted on singing the songs in different languages himself. It was a bit surreal to hear him sing in German, and frankly it is very noticable that it isn’t his mother tongue.
Just in case you want to listen to an example: “Son of Man”, sung by Collins, in …
On the other hand, I do appreciate the effort. Letting someone else do it would have been easier for him, but instead he sat down and learned a ton of phonetical lines by heart, in four different languages - none of which he understands. For all seven or so voiced songs in the movie.
Mostly they would use the original voice actor. It’s more of a hassle to find and recruit talent that sounds similar and add them to a payroll, add a line in the credits, schedule voice recording times etc than getting the original to learn a paragraph in a foreign language. It’s not hard , like you said, but it’s a hassle and it takes time away from several people in different areas.
You would have exceptions of course, perhaps the show has very eccentric producers/directors and enough of a budget but when it comes to resource management a couple minutes of voice dialogue usually isn’t worth it.
That can totally depend on the situation and who’s the voice actor. In the case of My Life As A Teenage Robot, I’m pretty sure in the episode where Jenny loses her English voice disk, her voice actor does both her English and Japanese form the whole episode. I could be wrong about that’s so feel free to correct me if I am.
I don’t remember ever seeing them switch out the voice actors.
They just learn the bits in the other language. It’s not like it has to be good. Most of the time they totally butcher it, but who cares?
