I’ve noticed that there are a lot of what appear to be dubbed adverts around. The mouths don’t match the sounds, and it’s not just a case of getting out of synch.
So I assumed these were adverts made in countries where English isn’t the common language; if budget is a concern, then dubbing in voices is a lot better than filming a whole new ad with English actors. Yet, a lot of the companies behind these products appear to be American.
So here’s my question; do advertisers dub British voices in for American ones in adverts aired in Britain?
They do in Australia, I was having a post-highschool drunken romp for a number of months, and I saw a couple (not many) ads with dubbed Aussie accents that I’d seen in Canada. Planet is full of tightwads the world over.
I went to Ireland for a month in, uh, 1983. There was an ad for clothes soap which was definitely dubbed from Spanish.
Ads that are dubbed from English can be seen in Spain in different languages. Sometimes they don’t even bother get a similar voice in a language and another (the voices seem to be too different to simply be this phenomenon where people talk in a higher voice when they’re not using their own language).
Being in Costa Rica I’ve seen an even funnier phenomenon: an ad dubbed from English, which got different accents - depending on the “target country”! I’d be watching cable and this ad came up speaking Rioplatense and sure enough, the little letters said ad valid only in Argentina; then, in the same batch of ads, it would come again but speaking Caribeño and the little letters said ad valid for Colombia only. The first time it cracked me up.
We get ads here in Ireland that are obviously English ads that have been dubbed over with a generic Irish accent - we can see the English accent version on the British channels
No cite, but I heard from someone who is in ads that it’s a union requirement in Ireland. (Also, Irish talent don’t get repeat fees for ads - just a one off payment.)
While flipping around on satellite TV, I’ve seen the exact same commercial for some fabric softner or something, dubbed into German, Arabic and English.
They even dub German ads for broadcasting in Austria. The Austrian and the German “German” are the same language - there are some minor differences in vocabulary (The common Austrian word for tomatoes is, for example, not in use in Germany, which caused the government in Vienna to lobby for an official exception in EU food legislation to allow them to use their word), but those differences are negligible and arguably smaller than between the various versions of English. The only real difference is accent - in most cases, you can very easily detect an Austrian among Germans (or vice versa) because of noticeable differences in accent. Apparently enough to make companies dub their commercials so they don’t sound “strange” to the particular audience.
