One of the things that makes it worth learning a foreign language well is that it opens a whole new world of movie viewing. No, I am not talking about watching foreign films, although that’s also great. I am referring to watching movies dubbed into a foreign language. <\/p>\n
It’s not just watching a movie, it’s a whole analytical audiovisual experience. <\/p>\n
When I saw “An American Werewolf in London” I was with a date who was from Venezuela. When the CCR song “Bad Moon Rising” came on, everyone laughed. Except Jesus. His English was pretty good, but not very colloquial, and he’d never heard the song before. I explained, and he got it, but nothing kills funny like an explanation. <\/p>\n
The first American movie I remember seeing when I lived in France was “Ghostbusters.” The voices didn’t fit the characters, none of the jokes or gags worked in French and I’d only been in France a few weeks so I was missing a lot of the dialogue. It was terrifically bad. Rick Moranis in French is just a wrong thing. I laughed my ass off, but I didn’t actually hear any of the jokes in English until the 90’s. At one point, Bill Murray turns to Dan Ackyroyd just when Sigourney Weaver turns into a giant hell hound and says “so she’s a dog.” I wondered if they’d said dog or bitch, because the French word for a female dog means both, then I wondered if calling someone a dog in French had the same connotation of ugliness that it does in English and I totally missed the next round of gags. <\/p>\n
There are several problems with a movie that is dubbed. The first is the actual voices of the actors. Imagine John Wayne. Very distinctive, drawling voice. In France, he was dubbed by an actor with a suave voice who also voiced many other male stars of the era. Charlton Heston, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda, Burt Lancaster, John Wayne. All the same. At times there would actually be movies where it sounded like all of the roles were being played by the same person. You have to be able to ignore that the actors all sound wrong to survive watching a dubbed film. <\/p>\n
I watched a John Travolta movie once, and I would swear that it was dubbed by Gerard Depardieu. I was so busy trying to figure out if it was really Depardieu doing Travolta that I couldn’t keep track of the plot. I have no idea what the movie even was.<\/p>\n
When a movie is dubbed, I can’t approach it like a movie I want to watch and enjoy as the director intended. It can still be entertaining, but it’s more like watching a parody of the actual movie. I pick apart the voices, i wonder who else I’ve heard them as, i wonder if a joke was as bad in the original version as it was in the dubbed one. To really watch a movie, it has to be in its original language with subtitles. <\/p>\n
Subtitles still have translation issues. That’s a whole other thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"