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[HildeKitten]

Am I the only person getting really annoyed with dubbing?

For Cartoons and animated movies I can understand it to some degree.  After all, the main target audience is children and a lot of them won't be able to read, or read well enough for subtitles.

But the dubbing of live action movies seriously makes my skin crawl.  It just ruins the entire movie for me.  The mouths are never sychronised with the words so it looks wrong and just feels wrong full stop.  If I see a live action movie dubbed I can't continue to watch it because I'll get too annoyed.

What bothers me most is that cinemas in Belgium are hardly showing original language cartoons anymore.
Princess and the Frog was only available in dub in most theatres, others only played it for a week.
And it's going the same way with live action movies from companies that are known for making "children's movies".

Terribly rubbish I say!

[dagobert]

In my opinion the movies are very well synchronised in German. Nevertheless we watch also movies in the original languages.

We lived in the US for half a year and we had the feeling, that mainly TV series and sometimes movies don't have such a good sound quality than they have here in Austria or Germany.

[smurfy74]

In portugal ( where my better half comes from ) live action movies are shown in their original format - which is mainly English and then thy have subtitles added, i think thats why he has a better understanding of English and is fluent yet hasnt studied it much at school. He says he prefers to see a film in its original language but they do dub all animated films as a rule.

[pussinboots]

I will never, ever understand why German, French, Spanish and Italian-speaking people happily put up with something as awful as dubbing. I just can't imagine ever wanting to see anything dubbed — even a Chinese movie or something similar I would never understand a word of.

I mean, say you're a fan of Meryl Streep. Or Robert Zemeckis. Or both. So you'd want to see Death Becomes Her, right? So wouldn't you want to hear Meryl Streep and the lines co-written by Robert Zemeckis? What good is it to hear some arbitrary French woman talk over her with a pun that barely works in French? Why can't she make her own film?

I was in Germany, and The Nanny was on TV. Fran Drescher had a normal voice. She had a normal voice! The whole show is based around her nasal utterances! I will never get it.

Oh, and the reason the sound quality is better in those dubbed languages is probably because they were recorded in a studio, rather than, say, on location on some windy mountaintop. That would do it.

[dagobert]

I think the reason why we are okay with dubbing is that we are just used to it. When we have been to the US we loved to see the English versions of the movies and it was really hard after we returned to watch them in German again.

So if it is possible to watch a movie in English we try to do this, but I don't like to see them in English with German subtitles.

[pussinboots]

I suppose... When I was in France as an exchange student, I asked the same question, and was told that after a while you don't notice anymore that the mouths don't sync up with the audio. That I can see, but what about the fact that the actor has had half of their acting taken away from them? Does that not bother people?

And I'd imagine it would be odd when you get accustomed to one Johnny Depp dubber, and then his dubber quits his job and all of a sudden Johnny Depp sounds like someone else. I can only compare it to Tony the Tiger or another cartoon character whose original voice artist has passed away. You never quite get used to it.

It's even sillier when they do it on the news (they do this in the UK and the US too sometimes.) Some distraught Afghan man is interviewed after some explosion and then some monotonous, emotionless voice dubs over him.

So what's wrong with subtitles? It seems like a nice solution. You keep the original voices and people who don't understand the original language can follow it. And they'll inevitably pick up a little from this other language to boot.

[dagobert]

I suppose... When I was in France as an exchange student, I asked the same question, and was told that after a while you don't notice anymore that the mouths don't sync up with the audio. That I can see, but what about the fact that the actor has had half of their acting taken away from them? Does that not bother people?

And I'd imagine it would be odd when you get accustomed to one Johnny Depp dubber, and then his dubber quits his job and all of a sudden Johnny Depp sounds like someone else. I can only compare it to Tony the Tiger or another cartoon character whose original voice artist has passed away. You never quite get used to it.

It's even sillier when they do it on the news (they do this in the UK and the US too sometimes.) Some distraught Afghan man is interviewed after some explosion and then some monotonous, emotionless voice dubs over him.

So what's wrong with subtitles? It seems like a nice solution. You keep the original voices and people who don't understand the original language can follow it. And they'll inevitably pick up a little from this other language to boot.

That happened with Johnny Depp in the PotC movies. Usually an other person dubbed his movies and at first this man also synchronized PotC, but the synchro studio was not very happy with this version and changed the synchronizer. The original dubber has a very smooth voice and in my opinion it didn't fit for a pirate. It wasn't a big problem for me, because Jack Sparrow doesn't really look like Johnny Depp and the new voice fits very well. It was a good choice, because the new voice is still similar to the original.

Now the first synchronizer is dubbing Johnny Depp again in all other movies.

In my opinion the German audio fits very well on the mouths.

As I have mentiones before that it was very hard for us to watch movies in German again after returning from the US where we have been for half a year. So we were used to English.
The reason why I don't like subtitles is, that I can't concentrate on the audio, because I always have to read the subtitles. I don't have any problems to understand the English and so the subtitles are very annoying.