Stephen Baxter explains the prevalence of (British) English across one of his multiverses as being the result of a particularly enterprising and colonial bunch of reality-hopping alt-human primates who have the culture of Victorian Britain for some reason.
The main differences seem to be their stature, the fact they pronounce Portuguese “Portugoose” and the fact they have tails which they find incredibly embarrassing. Oh, and they might have squeaky voices too.
I think the idea is that the human lineage skips the great ape phase in their reality but it’s all very, very silly.
Started (maybe) with the classic Roman Empire movies where they also spoke the Queen’s English. No Latin at all.
Doing other languages is tricky. You either have to just go with pretending it’s not a thing, use subtitles, or something in between. I’ve seen a lot of films start with them speaking the foreign language and then shift to them in English in some way. The original Shōgun did this where the first few exchanges went through a translator but then the translator part was skipped to increase the pace. Or you just don’t have a translation and let the actions dictate the meaning. The scenes in Andor of his childhood memories did this, no need to have subtitles.
I’m personally a fan of how The Hunt for Red October did it. Having an officer reading from a book in Russian and the camera zooms in on him, then it suddenly switches over to English and remains there for the rest of the film (with one exception).
![Too Close to the Truth [MoringMark]](https://lemmy.zip/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffiles.catbox.moe%2Fkeaoo8.png){kind=link}
This was a joke on Stargate. Alien races all over the galaxy speak perfect British English.
Stephen Baxter explains the prevalence of (British) English across one of his multiverses as being the result of a particularly enterprising and colonial bunch of reality-hopping alt-human primates who have the culture of Victorian Britain for some reason.
The main differences seem to be their stature, the fact they pronounce Portuguese “Portugoose” and the fact they have tails which they find incredibly embarrassing. Oh, and they might have squeaky voices too.
I think the idea is that the human lineage skips the great ape phase in their reality but it’s all very, very silly.
Started (maybe) with the classic Roman Empire movies where they also spoke the Queen’s English. No Latin at all.
Doing other languages is tricky. You either have to just go with pretending it’s not a thing, use subtitles, or something in between. I’ve seen a lot of films start with them speaking the foreign language and then shift to them in English in some way. The original Shōgun did this where the first few exchanges went through a translator but then the translator part was skipped to increase the pace. Or you just don’t have a translation and let the actions dictate the meaning. The scenes in Andor of his childhood memories did this, no need to have subtitles.
I’m personally a fan of how The Hunt for Red October did it. Having an officer reading from a book in Russian and the camera zooms in on him, then it suddenly switches over to English and remains there for the rest of the film (with one exception).