We usually watch subtitles rather than dubbing, but we happen to be watching the dubbed version of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon this evening. We were surprised to discover that the dubbed dialogue seems to be designed to match the actors’ lip movements–and in fact, it does a pretty good job.
Is this common? I’d never heard of this being done before.
The Disney dubs of Miyazaki films often change the dialog to minimize lip flap – not that it’s a big deal with anime in the first place. At least some of them have two sets of English subtitles, the one being the translated Japanese soundtrack and the other matching the English dub.
I was working on a sewing project once (the cutting part, no noise), and wanted to flip something on. I was really in the mood for Brotherhood of the Wolf, but couldn’t really watch it to follow the subtitles, so I turned the dub on.
UGH. It was one of the worst dub jobs I’ve seen. The part that really confused me was that they used different actors - I could at least understand for the French actors - even though I’d seen several of them speaking English, they still have an accent. But one of the actors is an American, and they couldn’t even get him to do his own dubbing!? They did very little work on the translation (I don’t know if it’s because I’m used to reading subtitle-ese, or what, but I swear the subtitles on that movie are less stilted than the dub dilogue), and the voice acting was… uninspired.
So, it’s certainly not always done, even on fairly well-known, recent films.
Anyone seen the dub on other recent big-name imports? Pan’s Labyrinth, maybe? What other recent non-English films (that got wide US interest) have there been?
I work for a subtitling/translation/dubbing company, and at a meeting, the dubbing department told us that a good translation for dubbing takes into account the accuracy and appropriateness of the translation as well as the duration of speech. They try to match them so that the dubbed voice isn’t noticeably longer or shorter than the original dialogue.
I don’t know if any special care was taken with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but I guess in a perfect world, all dubs would be like that.
I don’t know. Personally, I prefer my Kung Fu dubbing to be completely out of synch with the actor’s mouths and not matching the emotions of the actors, a la Kung Pow. 
In Anime, the tendency to match mouth flaps is one of the major reasons the dubs and subs can be so different.
Anyone ever see Ong Bak 2? Amazing action sequences, but without question the worst dubbing I’ve ever seen in a movie since 70’s kung-fu. Not just bad dubbing, but the voiceover actors are hilariously bad. They sounded just like South Park characters.