Nagy Dani

The disadvantages of dubbing

           

Dubbing is one of the most often used methods of making a foreign language movie available to a domestic market (Koolstra, Peeters, & Spinhof, 2012). The term means the process of recording and replacing voices on motion pictures. When a foreign language film is dubbed, the original texts and dialogues are translated and then precisely matched to the lip movements of the original actors in the movie. There are several parts of this field that cause major problems, and the entire dubbing procedure has various negative effects on viewers and their cinematic experience. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the diverse disadvantages of dubbing. It completely ruins the cinematic experience; therefore, dubbing should be banned in every country.

One of the major problems with dubbing concerns translation (Koolstra, Peeters, & Spinhof, 2012). Firstly, there are many scenes in movies that depend on puns, ambiguous wordplay or culture related jokes. In this case, it is impossible to translate a dialogue because the meaning and sense will be completely lost. Secondly, in numerous motion pictures the use of various languages is essential; for example, the famous movie Babel, directed by Alejandro González Inárritu, is about misunderstandings between people because of language barriers. Without the core element of the diverse language use, the movie loses its sense. Finally, some characters lose their charm because of bad translation and dubbing. For example, in the television show Modern Family, one of the main characters, played by Sofia Vergara, has a very thick Colombian accent in English, which makes the character hilarious and this does not appear in the dubbed versions of the series.

Another huge disadvantage of dubbing is the quality of work of the post-production team. First of all, in many countries voice actors are underpaid (Koolstra, Peeters, & Spinhof, 2012) and get very small credit, which highly affect their work. Secondly, lines are usually recorded separately to save time and money. Numerous voice actors record all of their characters’ lines in one go, not even in chronological order, and they cannot interact with other actors, which makes the process of acting extremely difficult. Thirdly, in various motion pictures voice actors’ voices are so different from the characters’ that they become unnatural. For instance, in Japanese anime television shows, each character has a very soft and high pitched voice, which is an essential part of each character. In the German version, the entire series becomes unenjoyable and ridiculous because of the hardness of the German language. Finally, one of the biggest works is matching the lip movement with the voice of the dubbing artist. In many cases it is impossible because while in some languages words might have one syllable, in other the same words might have two, three or even four syllables; for example, the English word “hat” is translated to French as chapeau, which is much longer than the original word. This phenomenon makes the job of the post-production team and translators extremely difficult and many critics claim that it is impossible to do a perfect job of dubbing (Kilborn, 1999).

            In several countries, the use of subtitles and original language is preferred to dubbing, not only because of the difficulty of doing a perfect dubbing, but its effects on language knowledge. According to recent statistics (Koolstra, Peeters, & Spinhof, 2012), in countries where subtitles are used instead of dubbing, people speak at least one foreign language fluently, while in countries where dubbing is used, they tend to speak fewer foreign languages. For instance, in Sweden, where films are not dubbed at all, people speak more foreign languages than in Hungary, where dubbing is a well-developed area of film industry. Therefore, the prohibition of dubbing could have a positive impact on the foreign language knowledge of people in Europe.

To conclude, there are several major disadvantages with the use of dubbing for foreign films. Poor translation can ruin the entire film, because jokes, puns or comments that are directly related to a culture cannot be translated. Moreover, many of the voice actors are underpaid and do not get enough credits for their work. What is more, the synchronization of lip movement to the voice actors’ voice is almost impossible to do perfectly. Languages and cultures can be so different that it is an extremely difficult job to create a perfect dubbed movie. In addition, the use of subtitles has a positive impact on the viewers’ language knowledge. The myriad of disadvantages illustrate that dubbing has many negative effects on movies, therefore dubbing should not be used, it should be banned.

References

Kilborn, R. (1999). ‘Speak my Language: Current Attitudes to Television. Media, Culture and Society, 641-660.

Koolstra, C. M., Peeters, A. L., & Spinhof, H. (2012). The Pros and Cons of Dubbing and Subtitling. European Journal of Communication, 325-354.