Grayhome wrote:Perhaps they have a few movies on board that got salvaged by the Loroi teams. I would think that the Death Stars from Star Wars would earn some attention, not to mention a few other Sci-Fi movie gadgets.
Hm.
When humans are learning a new language, one of the common modern ways of teaching it is to use dubbed and subtitled movies, in order to better immerse the audience in the use of the language.
So it seems possible to me that movie night on the Bellarmine involved watching human movies dubbed into Trade, in order to explain Alex's deftness with the language.
But the movie's dialogue generally have to meet a few criteria. For instance, it ought to be simple enough for the audience to follow it somewhat even without the dialogue, because they're
going to miss at least some of it. It ought to reflect standard use of the language, rather than eccentric, colloquial, or highly individualized variants, because the audience
ought to learn from it. It ought to be easy to translate both denotatively and connotatively and retain the same meaning, because fuck puns.
So things like Shakespeare are right out because Shakespeare loved him some clever wordplay, and that doesn't really translate well into different words.
You also don't want your ship's staff going into space with their use of language shaped in part by translations of nonsense or obscure memes, although Jardin is living proof that you just can't stop some people. "Take me to your leader," "Get out of my mind," etc.
Comedies in general ought to be more situational or physical than verbal, but aren't necessarily beyond translation.
For these reasons and others, kids' movies and action movies are popular for second language classes, whereas, again, Shakespeare and the like are not. It seems likely that if there are translated movies aboard the Bellarmine, they'd follow that convention, and if there are movies that Alex would explain to the Loroi and expect Beryl to learn from, then he would also choose simple, easily-translated dialogue, for his own personal convenience.
If Alex were to either try to teach English to Beryl via English-language movies, or to show a Trade-dubbed movie to the Loroi for entertainment reasons, I'd think it would be a movie that he felt encapsulated human virtues and human culture, without being too mired down in the specifics and minutiae of human life and history and culture. Something powerful and human, yet with a certain level of emotional universality, both simple enough to appeal to a completely unfamiliar and alien audience such as the Loroi and deep enough to reward more intense scrutiny and study on the part of a race whose scholars have photographic memories.
So I think Alex's choice of movies should be pretty clear.
Rocky IV.