Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site ucla-cs.ARPA
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!gamma!epsilon!zeta!sabre!petrus!bellcore!decvax!ucbvax!ucdavis!lll-crg!dual!qantel!hplabs!sdcrdcf!ucla-cs!reiher
From: reiher@ucla-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.movies
Subject: Re: Subtitling vs. Dubbing
Message-ID: <6824@ucla-cs.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 11-Sep-85 21:21:44 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucla-cs.6824
Posted: Wed Sep 11 21:21:44 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 18-Sep-85 03:34:05 EDT
References: <356@decwrl.UUCP> <1138@mtgzz.UUCP>
Reply-To: reiher@ucla-cs.UUCP (Peter Reiher)
Organization: UCLA Computer Science Department
Lines: 35

In article <1138@mtgzz.UUCP> leeper@mtgzz.UUCP (m.r.leeper) writes:
>
>I liked the subtitled version of Z but completely
>missed important points that I was able to get out of the dubbed
>version.  

It depends on the film whether subtitles lose anything.  The only foreign
language I know enough of to even approach understanding is Spanish.  (This
turned out to be a poor choice for me, since very few films worth seeing
are made in Spanish, and the ones that are are almost never shown in the US
outside of Spanish language theaters, which tend to advertise outside of
the places I look.)  I recently did see a Spanish film worth seeing, though,
"The Holy Innocents", which was subtitled.  Listening as best I could to
the Spanish, I detected no more than two times in the entire film that the
subtitles either left something important out or missed an important nuance.

I will trade the actor's original expressiveness for extra, usually unimportant
words any day.  Having seen, for instance, "Fanny and Alexander" both subtitled
and dubbed (the latter was a longer version, some two hours longer), I know
that I preferred the subtitled version, even though the dubbed version had
substantial extra material which enriched the story.  It was well dubbed, 
unlike most dubbed films, but the actors doing the dubbing were not nearly
as good as the best Swedish actors Ingmar Bergman could find.  (Not terribly
surprising.)

The only situation in which I consider dubbing appropriate is when the actor
doing the dubbing is the same actor who did the original sound.  In some
multinational film productions, dubbing is a necessity, since the is no
single language spoken by all the actors (for example, "1900" with DeNiro,
Depardieu, Donald Sutherland, Burt Lancaster, etc.), but even then it is an
unfortunate necessity.
-- 
        			Peter Reiher
				reiher@LOCUS.UCLA.EDU
        			{...ihnp4,ucbvax,sdcrdcf}!ucla-cs!reiher


Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com