I swear to God, that's how it sounds!
Get your mind out of the gutter, it's not about some Czech adult flick with cuties from Prague and a creepy old guy.
It's the commercial on Comedy Central in German announcing the new Jackass movie sequel.
The TV and film dubbing industry is one quirky business to us outsiders. For one, it is a rather difficult and expensive job if you want to get it right. Second, many of the folks who do it don't seem to get it right.
How in the world can you justify, for example, giving Homer Simpson a Spanish voice so low that it is just barely above the inaudible frequency ranges near 0 Hertz?
Homer is a big guy, and we can debate the comedic effect of voice types as long we want, says our resident speech analyst, but gimme a break, when all vocalization is a series of low rumbling sounds, there is no fun any more.
We suspect that the pool of dubbing actors in most countries is quite small and jealously guarded. Is subtitling the answer?
At least, if you only have translated text at the bottom of the screen, the cast keep their original voices.
When I'm tired, getting a rumbling Homie or a subtitled Homie makes no difference in my effort to follow the story, explained our resident analyst. The dubbing biz is a microcosm of language politics in general.
The analyst has a point.
The other way, we saw a movie with Japanese subtitles. Half the screen, half of the generous 14 inches, was taken up by subtitles.
What does Jackass sound like in Japanese, by the way?
No comments:
Post a Comment