Languages

What we ran

Fifteen scenes, each written in seven languages: English, Cantonese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, French. 105 takes planned, 99 delivered. One scene — an argument with a taxi driver about the route — only survived in Cantonese (n 13), so fourteen scenes have the full seven-way comparison.

Twelve of the scenes are short: one or two sentences, no camera, no light, no grade. "A weekday family breakfast in a small apartment. Someone is running late, grabs a slice of toast and rushes out; the door slams. The mother sighs and drinks her tea." (n 1, 165 characters). The other six versions say the same thing: "平日の朝、小さなアパートで家族の朝食…" (n 4), "평일 아침, 좁은 아파트에서 가족이 아침을 먹는다…" (n 18), "Un petit-déjeuner en famille un jour de semaine, dans un petit appartement…" (n 20).

1平日の朝、小さなアパートで家族の朝食。誰かが遅刻しそうでトーストをつかんで飛び出し、ドアがバタンと閉まる。母はため息をついてお茶を飲む。

Three scenes are the opposite — fully directed, 676–862 characters, with ACTION / CAMERA & LIGHT / SOUND / MOOD headings: a wet market at dawn (n 73–76, 91–93), the last bus home (n 77–80, 94–96), a barber's last cut (n 81–84, 97–99). Those three exist to test whether direction overrides whatever the language does.

Every clip is 10s and 21:9 except n 72, which came back at 15s.

1퇴근 시간, 길거리 포장마차. 김이 오르고 주문 소리가 오가고, 단골들은 말하지 않아도 알아서 나온다.

One confound has to be stated up front, because it runs through the whole experiment. These are faithful translations, and a faithful translation makes lexical choices that are themselves locations. The Korean street-food prompt says 포장마차 — the word is the red vinyl tent. The Japanese says 屋台. The Cantonese taxi prompt says 的士. Those aren't language effects, they're vocabulary effects, and I've flagged them where they matter. The interesting cases are the ones where the words were generic and the world moved anyway.

What happened

Casting tracks the language in twelve of the fourteen comparable scenes, and it is the single most reliable effect on the sheet. The breakfast scene is the cleanest read, because at 9s every one of the seven is the same shot — the mother, alone, lifting a cup. n 1 (EN) is a woman who reads South Asian. n 2 (YUE), n 4 (JA) and n 18 (KO) are East Asian women. n 3 (ES) is a white European woman with auburn hair. n 19 (AR) is an olive-skinned woman with a newspaper on the table under warm, dim light. n 20 (FR) is a grey-haired white woman with a pastry on the plate. Nothing in any prompt describes her. She is inferred entirely from the language it was written in.

Where the scene has an exterior, the whole city moves. The street-food stall (scene 2) is the strongest example in the family. n 21 (KO) is a Seoul side street: a red vinyl tent, blue plastic stools, overhead power lines, and Korean shop signage on every neighbouring frontage. n 22 (AR) is a wide boulevard lined with illuminated Arabic-script shopfronts and a checked-cloth umbrella cart. n 7 (ES) is a striped awning over a griddle of round masa cakes with Latin-script signage behind. n 8 (JA) is a yatai under a red paper lantern with vertical Japanese signage. n 6 (YUE) is stacked bamboo steamers and a rank of office workers in white shirts. The KO and JA prompts named 포장마차 and 屋台. The Arabic one did not — it says only "عربة طعام في الشارع", a food cart in the street — and it still built an Arabic-signed boulevard. The French one borrows English: "Un stand de street food à l'heure de pointe du soir", and still returns a European street.

1Un puesto de comida callejera en plena hora punta: vapor, pedidos a gritos y clientes habituales que no necesitan pedir.

Moving day does the same thing. n 90 (FR) is a Haussmann facade with wrought-iron balconies, plane trees, a row of small hatchbacks and a French-format plate on the truck. n 70 (YUE) is a dense street with a rank of scooters. n 72 (JA) is a low-rise residential street at golden hour with utility poles. n 69 (EN) is a suburban house behind clipped hedges. The prompt is one line: "the last box will not fit in the van, and everyone has an opinion about it."

1Jour de déménagement : le dernier carton ne rentre pas dans le camion, et tout le monde a son avis là-dessus.

English is not the neutral option. This is the finding a practitioner is most likely to get wrong. The English street-food take (n 5) is a stainless cart with hanging bulbs, a griddle of savoury pancakes, foam boxes and an East Asian queue under umbrellas — it lands in East Asia, not America. The English convenience store (n 14) is a konbini aisle. The English alley football (n 34) is a warm Mediterranean-looking alley. English doesn't produce an English-speaking world; it produces the model's strongest prior for that scene, whatever that prior happens to be.

1A street food stall at evening rush hour: steam, shouted orders, and regulars who don't need to say what they want.

Domestic interiors carry culture even when nothing is named. n 4 (JA) breakfast has a genkan with shoes lined up by the door, a shoe rack, fusuma sliding panels along the right wall, and toast on wooden trays. The prompt says "小さなアパート" — small apartment — and nothing else about the room. n 33 (JA), the power-cut story, is a tatami room with the children sitting on the floor around a low table by shoji screens, while n 32 (ES) and n 52 (FR) are both sofa-and-bookshelf living rooms with a floor lamp. n 20 (FR) breakfast has a fridge covered in magnets.

Wardrobe follows too, in ways the prompt never specifies. In the wedding toast, n 12 (JA) puts the groom in a white dinner jacket — the standard Japanese reception convention — while n 9 (EN), n 10 (YUE) and n 24 (KO) put him in black. n 26 (FR) has the best man in a navy suit and tie rather than black tie. In the barber scene, n 97 (KO) dresses him in a white medical-style coat, which is what a Korean 이발소 barber wears; n 84 (JA) and n 99 (FR) both use a black waistcoat over a white shirt.

On-screen text comes back in the script you wrote it in. All seven barber prompts specify the sign copy, and five of seven render it: CLOSED (n 81), CERRADO (n 83), FERMÉ (n 99, accent correct), مغلق (n 98, correctly formed and legible), and a vertical Chinese sign reading 休息 hung in the window of n 82. This is compliance, not inference — the word was supplied each time — but it is worth knowing that Arabic and Chinese sign copy renders cleanly. In the Japanese and Korean takes the sign beat doesn't appear at all in any frame I sampled.

1理髮師退休前最後一鋪，十秒，完整導演指示。 動作 —— 一個老師傅剪完最後一個頭。掃返個頸，一嘢抖開條圍布，攞住面手鏡照返個客後尾枕。個客點頭。老師傅掃地，轉個牌變「休息」，然後企喺自己間空舖中間，手仲揃住條掃把。 鏡頭同光 —— 50mm，固定，由等位嗰邊影過去。鏡面頂嗰條燈管暖黃色，後面窗口透入嘅日光係冷色。 聲 —— 較剪聲，抖圍布嗰下，頭髮跌落地磚，掃把聲，門口個鈴，然後乜都冇。 氣氛 —— 唔煙情。佢冇留低慢慢惏。就係咹所以先入心。

Now the null results, which are half the story. Institutional interiors do not move. The office farewell (scene 8) is the same modern open-plan floor with floor-to-ceiling glass and a city skyline in all seven — n 38, 39, 40, 41, 56, 57, 58. Same desks, same cake on a table, same standing semicircle of colleagues. Only the faces change. The last bus (scene 14) is the same generic city bus in all seven — blue moulded seats, grey grab poles, the same locked-off wide down the aisle. The bus stop in the rain (scene 9) is the same cool grey light, the same black umbrellas, the same glass shelter everywhere. If you want a Japanese office or a Hong Kong minibus, the language of your prompt will not get it for you.

One genre held its own accent against five of seven languages. Karaoke came back as a private KTV box — banquette sofas, low table, disco spill — in English (n 65), Cantonese (66), Spanish (67), Japanese (68) and Korean (85). n 67 is Spanish-speaking casting in an unmistakably East Asian room. Only Arabic (n 86) and French (n 87) relocated it to a public bar with tables and a lyric screen. The model's prior for "karaoke" is strong enough to survive a language change; the prior for "kitchen" is not.

Full direction narrows the gap, mostly by removing the frame where culture would be visible. At 5s the wet-market takes (n 73–76, 91–93) are nearly interchangeable: seven macro shots of silver fish on wet steel. That's not the language being overridden — it's the prompt specifying "Handheld 35mm, close over the counter", which points the camera at the one part of a wet market that looks the same everywhere. Back off to 1.5s and the differences return: n 74 has a green mechanical scale and a roller shutter, n 92 has polystyrene boxes and a man in a knit beanie, n 76 has an outdoor market roof. The barbershop is the sharper version of the same point: under 678–748 characters of direction, the room is functionally identical in all seven — porcelain chair, mirror bench, tiled floor, row of waiting chairs — and the only things that change are the face, the coat, and what's written on the glass.

Two scenes broke the casting pattern, and it's worth saying so. The Korean wedding toast (n 24) returns a black-tie head table of guests who read as white European — no Korean markers at all — and the Arabic one (n 25) is a generic hotel ballroom. Every other wedding shifted. The wedding is where casting is weakest, probably because "wedding reception" is itself a heavily Westernised visual prior. And the power-cut scene (6) is the least comparable set on the sheet for a different reason: n 50 (KO) and n 51 (AR) came back so underexposed that there is little to read. That's a lighting outcome, not a cultural one.

Notable takes

21 | Seoul, unasked-for | The prompt names the tent. It did not name the Korean signage on every shop down the street, the utility poles, or the blue stools. 7 | A griddle of masa cakes | "Un puesto de comida callejera" — a generic phrase — and the model built a Latin American street market around it. 4 | The genkan | Shoes by the door, a shoe rack, fusuma panels. The prompt said "small apartment." 90 | French plates | Haussmann stone, iron balconies, a row of hatchbacks, and a French-format plate on the truck. One sentence about a box that won't fit. 5 | English is not America | The English street-food take lands in East Asia. Whatever you think English defaults to, check it. 82 | 休息 in the window | Same barbershop as all six others, plus a Hong Kong street outside it and a vertical Chinese sign on the glass.

What this means if you're prompting FLUX.3

Language is a location control, not a dialogue control. If you write in Japanese, expect a Japanese cast in a Japanese room. That is useful when you want it and a bug when you don't. If you're writing a scene set in Lagos, writing it in French will fight you.

Don't treat English as the neutral baseline. It isn't. It picks the model's dominant prior for the scene, which landed in East Asia three times out of the exteriors here. If you want a specific place, name the place — in any language.

Watch your own vocabulary. 포장마차, 屋台, 的士 and supérette are set-dressing instructions wearing the costume of ordinary words. Use the generic term if you want the generic set.

Interiors of institutions won't move. Offices, buses, waiting rooms and shelters came back as the same global-corporate template in all seven languages. Language will change who is in the room. It will not change the room. Say "a Japanese office" if that's what you need.

Casting is the reliable knob; the set is the unreliable one. Faces tracked language in twelve of the fourteen comparable scenes. Location tracked it wherever there was an exterior or a home, and not at all where there wasn't.

Write your sign copy out, in the script you want. CERRADO, FERMÉ and مغلق all rendered correctly and legibly. Arabic and Chinese on-screen text is not a reason to avoid this model.

If you need seven versions of one scene to match, direct the camera close. The three fully-directed scenes are the most consistent on the sheet — largely because a specified close lens points away from the parts of the world that differ. That's a legitimate technique, not a cheat.