What it says on the tin: when things are dubbed (or subbed) over into other languages, how much, if any, are regional accents taken into consideration?
I’m assuming it’s a decision made by the translators on an individual basis. I know that some anime dubs got flack for trying to give characters “equivalent” accents in English (like the Kansai dialect becoming “Southern”, for example). And of course there’s the standard “Funny Foreigner” type accents, like Asian people infamously not being able to say r’s, that is gradually not as egregious any more, but very noticeable in those older dubs.
So what’s it like for you non-American based Dopers? Share your anecdotes if you don’t have solid cites.
It happens sometimes. The French film Les Visiteurs starts with the cast speaking in cod-medieval French and the subtitles are in cod-Shakespearian English. A similar thing happens in Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis when the characters start speaking in patois.
I’ve only seen this with subtitles – which would be hard enough to write. Even the title is impossible to translate into English – though “Welcome to the Sticks” is a nice pun.
I’ve read the character of Klaus in American Dad is portrayed as an ex-Stasi Agent from East Germany in the German language dub of the show (as opposed to an Olympic Skier who can play to various German stereotypes in the English-language version)
In other cases, I believe they find a local language-specific stereotype they can play off (eg if, in the English language version, a character is a redneck, they’ll dub them with whatever the local version of a redneck accent is).
In Spanish, voices are differentiated but for some reason there usually is no attempt to use “our” regional accents, either in games or movies. Nowadays dubbing studios don’t even hire people with different accents and just use them (as they did back in the '40s or '50s): if you hear a Mexican dubbing everybody speaks with the same Mexican accent and if you hear a Spanish dubbing everybody speaks Castillian except if Antonio Banderas played them in English - in that case, the Spanish version will have his voice and therefore a softened Malaga accent, changing to a more-marked Malaga accent occasionally for comic effect.
In English, dwarves speak with a Scottish accent (or try); in Spanish, they have deep voices (gruff ones for males) but no specific accent.
Before WoW got dubbed into Spanish and “the usual studio” got the job, Spanish players would spend time trying to match English accents to Spanish ones: trolls would have spoken either “generic Caribbean” or Argentinian, dwarves Aragonese, etc. Pfaugh on the neutered dubbings I say, pfaugh!