[jgauth]

"The Hunt for Red October" had an interesting way of handling this with the Russian speakers. The movie starts with them speaking Russian with English subtitles, does a slow zoom into the Russian-speaker's lips, and switches to English mid-sentence.

[jkingsman]

With some elegance, too; iirc they pivot languages on the word "Golgotha" as he reads from the bible, the Latin word for a location near Jerusalem, but having a non-English/non-Russian word be when they switch made it a lot less jarring. Plus, having it be during a read-out-loud-from-book portion allowed for more measured cadence that smoothed the switch but probably would have felt jarring if the audience were parsing multi-character dialogue when it happened.

[nwallin]

> they pivot languages on the word "Golgotha"

"Armageddon" actually. Poignant because it's a movie about a nuclear ballistic submarine. But not a particularly non-English word.

[jkingsman]

ahhh I misremembered — an even better choice!

[1718627440]

> "Golgotha", the latin word

Isn't it Hebrew? (for example see John 19,17)

[defrost]

From what I have to hand ..

It appeared in the Latin Vulgate (an early predominately Latin version of the Bible), the Oxford English Dictionary has it as an Aramaic form of the Hebrew "gulgōleþ" (copied from the dictionary) or skull like hill.

[stevage]

I found that incredibly clunky when I saw it. Also, it's a little bit extra jarring that Sean Connery goes from speaking Russian to speaking English with a Scottish accent.

[3cats-in-a-coat]

That's just how the Babel Fish works. It translates perfectly, but it tacks on a random accent.

[sms95]

That trick has been used in movies before that too. "Judgment at Nuremberg" does something similar. A character is speaking German, slow zoom, then a switch to English.

[3cats-in-a-coat]

We're zooming into their miiiiiind!