![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingI am continuing to watch White Collar, though this has to be done annoyingly late at night when the temperature has cooled enough that I can turn my fan down a notch and thus actually have a faint prayer of hearing the dialogue. As I result, I have only gotten through episode 5, "The Portrait."
I don't want to say anything about the show as a whole until I've at least reached the end of the first season (well, beyond saying that I am obviously still enjoying it *grin*), but there was a minor point in "The Portrait" that knocked my suspension of disbelief for a temporary loop.
Basically, there is a written note on the back of the titular portrait. The note is in English. The problem is that the artist was, if I heard the dialogue correctly, Hungarian, or at least painting in Hungary before "the war," which in context almost certainly means WWII. I am therefore extremely doubtful that he would have written his note in English.
Hungarian is, of course, the most likely language. German is also likely, since the artist's name (Haustenberg? von Haustenberg? something like that) is very Germanic, and Hungary was, of course, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire up until WWI. French might even be possible, since it was Europe's international language of culture and diplomacy for centuries. English, though? In that place and time, English is just weird.
I know the show runners needed the note to be comprehensible to the audience, but still, would it have been so hard to write it in a reasonable language and have a character verbally translate? That translation would both have been more accurate and would have made Neal (or Mozzie) seem even cooler for knowing a foreign language. (German or French would probably work better than Hungarian in that case, since... well, Hungary never had colonies and so didn't spread its language around the world, and Hungarian carries much less cultural prestige than the other two languages. It's also not an Indo-European language, so native English speakers have a much harder time learning Hungarian than learning French or German.)
Anyway, it's a minor point, but it annoyed me.
I don't want to say anything about the show as a whole until I've at least reached the end of the first season (well, beyond saying that I am obviously still enjoying it *grin*), but there was a minor point in "The Portrait" that knocked my suspension of disbelief for a temporary loop.
Basically, there is a written note on the back of the titular portrait. The note is in English. The problem is that the artist was, if I heard the dialogue correctly, Hungarian, or at least painting in Hungary before "the war," which in context almost certainly means WWII. I am therefore extremely doubtful that he would have written his note in English.
Hungarian is, of course, the most likely language. German is also likely, since the artist's name (Haustenberg? von Haustenberg? something like that) is very Germanic, and Hungary was, of course, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire up until WWI. French might even be possible, since it was Europe's international language of culture and diplomacy for centuries. English, though? In that place and time, English is just weird.
I know the show runners needed the note to be comprehensible to the audience, but still, would it have been so hard to write it in a reasonable language and have a character verbally translate? That translation would both have been more accurate and would have made Neal (or Mozzie) seem even cooler for knowing a foreign language. (German or French would probably work better than Hungarian in that case, since... well, Hungary never had colonies and so didn't spread its language around the world, and Hungarian carries much less cultural prestige than the other two languages. It's also not an Indo-European language, so native English speakers have a much harder time learning Hungarian than learning French or German.)
Anyway, it's a minor point, but it annoyed me.
