You might think Blair Rudes has one of the few fail-safe careers in Hollywood. He trains directors and actors in lost, or dying, languages. Having worked on the sets of both The New World and the forthcoming The Ruins, he’s coached actors in Virginia Algonquian and Yukatec Maya. It would seem that when you’re translating dialogue into a moribund tongue, it’s hard to go wrong. First, there’s not much competition. Second, who’s going to fault this kind of detective work?
Believe it or not, somebody will. Rudes didn’t work on Dances with Wolves, but apparently it’s well-known how the native dialogue took a glaring wrong turn in that film.

University of Buffalo