An article about Harry Potter in other countries has me curious:
If one were to go see Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows 2 in France or Italy or Germany or South America, would it more likely be shown in English with subtitles in the local language or dubbed into the local language? Or does it depend on the country? Do other countries have options of dubbed v. subtitles for current hit U.S. and English movies?
When I watch a foreign movie I prefer to have subtitles. Dubbing throws me off, especially the background sounds.
In Central Asia (and I assume Russia) English movies all seem to be dubbed into Russian (bizarrely, I’m sure we even picked up a dvd that had no English soundtrack…surely it’s more effort to take away that option than to leave it there)
A Portuguese guy at my work said that Spain generally tends to dub into Spanish, while the Portuguese make more use of subtitles.
The more speakers of a language, the more financial sense it makes to dub movies/TV progams. So French, Spanish, German, Russian speaking countries: probably yes. In Denmark, subtitles are used for everything that doesn’t originate locally.
Depends on country, germans and french really love to dub their TV and movies. Here in Sweden everything is subtitled except children’s shows. Animated movies from the likes of Disney and Pixar are shown in subtitled and dubbed versions.
In this case in the Netherlands you will probably have both, as the movie is also marketed at kids. I know the first few were available both in the orginal version (with subtitles) and with dutch dubbing. This is true for pretty much all kids movies. Any Pixar release (or Disney earlier) will be available in both versions. More adult movies will only be available in the original with subtitles. This also goes for French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, ets movies by the way.
I saw Schindler’s List in Colombia, and it was subtitled in Spanish. (Thank God, because the sound system of the theater was so bad the Spanish subtitles were easier to understand than the English sound track.)
On the other hand, I saw Lion King in Colombia, too, and it was dubbed into Spanish. I remember that distinctly, because Shenzi, Banzai and Ed had Cuban accents.
Similar to what others are saying:
When I watched The Simpsons in Israel, they used Hebrew subtitles. When I watched it in Costa Rica and France, they were dubbed.
In Sweden, the first five films was dubbed, the rest was/is not, considering the targeting audience I guess. (In Sweden only films for children are dubbed, otherwise it is always subtitles on tv and at the movies.)
The third Harry Potter movie came out while I was living in Japan, and I saw it at the local theater. It was subtitled in Japanese. It was my impression that a dubbed version would be released later, or that in a bigger city one would already have the choice of subbed vs. dubbed. but in my town the subtitled version was the only one showing.
At the video rental store I only rented movies that were in English with Japanese subtitles, but many were available dubbed into Japanese. I saw part of Titanic and the first HP movie broadcast on Japanese television and they were both dubbed into Japanese.
I also saw The Last Samurai in the theater in Japan, and the English parts were subtitled in Japanese. The Japanese parts maintained the English subtitles from the US version of the film.
Here in Panama all English language movies for an adult audience are subtitled in Spanish. Movies for kids will be dubbed.
Movies with a potentially mixed audience, like Harry Potter, will be shown in both subtitled and dubbed versions. Here’s the movie schedulefor the current Harry Potter (actually, it looks like they are re-showing part one in anticipation of the arrival of part two), with some screens showing “doblada” and some “subtitulada.” The dubbed version usually ends up running for a longer time, so I try to catch the subtitled version early in the run.
Correction, the first five had a dubbed version available (if it was five, it may have been four), there was also an English language version.
The very first one not to have a dubbed version was a rather bad experience for me. I went to see it at Rigoletto on Kungsgatan in Stockholm and the woman directly behind me read out every single subtitle to her child, as he was unable to read them himself. I said something to her right at the beginning, before I really realised what was going on, but after that what are you supposed to do? You’ll only upset the kid and it isn’t the kid’s fault.
I had words afterwards about how she had utterly ruined the film for me and in future she should really reconsider whether to take her child to subtitled movies if he couldn’t read.
Ejecting would just have upset the kid, which was something I wanted to avoid. I was too angry at the end that the idea of asking for my money back just didn’t occur to me.
Amazing, isn’t it. I just can’t imagine how she could have thought it was acceptable.
Part of the reason why most adults in Scandinavian countries speak English in the first place is that they grew up watching subtitled movies and TV-series instead of dubbed ones.
That way, they (well – we) slowly but surely got to know the basic sound, rhythm and grammar of the language, plus picked up plenty of useful expressions and turns-of-phrase along the way, from everyone from Homer Simpson to Tony Soprano.
I saw Dog Day Afternoon (Dia de Los Perros!) in Guatemala back in 1976, which was in English and subtitled in Spanish. The subtitles lagged the English, so when Sal responds to the question “What country do you want to go to?” and replies “Montana” (or was it ‘Wyoming’?), I was the only person laughing in the entire theater.
I see a fair number of English-language movies here in Korea; they are all in English with Korean subtitles. This proved inconvenient with the recent X-Men movie, with a fair number of scenes in German, Russian and French, all with Korean subtitles.
I sometimes read the Spanish subtitles, especially if it’s an action movie and it’s not too important to follow the dialog in English. It can be very entertaining to see just how bad the translation is.
One of the funniest was when Deadwood was on TV, and they kept referring to Al Swearengen’s establishment as “El Gimnasio” (The Gymnasium). The translator had misheard “The Gem” as “The Gym.” I figured there must have been a lot of acrobatic activities going on there until I saw a scene with the name over the door.
Though I read Spanish, it can be a little hard to keep up if I actually have to rely on the subtitles in a non-English movie. One of these days I have to see Amelie (in French) again but with English subtitles to see what I missed the first time through.
