OTOH, Israeli viewers are so accustomed to subtitles that many domestic TV shows and most Israeli movies are shown with subtitles(or close captioning, whatever the difference is).
Personally, I love subtitles. They help me keep track of character names.
Characters names are written in Israeli subtitles?
I get the idea that subtitling is more expensive that dubbing. This is just my own personal experience, but as I move from richer to poorer countries, the availability of subtitled television and movies goes from abundant to nonexistent. In Vietnam, the dubbing is truly awful. One lady - and it sounds like the same lady for each program and movie - does all the dubbing for every actor and actress. What is worse, they don’t even bother to suppress the original audio track so she has to talk quite loudly to be heard over the actors’ real voices. I don’t know how anyone can stand watching such a program.
They are when other characters say them.
Ok. I was envisioning something like that in your subtitles :
Bob says : Hello
Since it’s done in some cases for subtitles intended for deaf people (along with many other infos they can’t perceive : cheerings, relevant noises, etc…), I though that maybe subtitles in Israel indicated the name of the character speaking.
As far as Germany is concerned, two aspects come to mind:
Germans aren’t used to watching subtitled movies and TV shows; there would be next to no willingness to do so. The only movies with subtitles are very highbrow, “artsy” pictures from places like Mongolia or Iceland.
Since German is the most widely spoken language in Europe, there is a significant industry that specializes in dubbing foreign (mainly American) movies and TV shows. Some actors do this type of work exclusively (for instance the well known German voice of Robert de Niro: Christian Brückner - Wikipedia ).
Dubbed versions often are rather bad (and have gotten worse over the decades). Sometimes, the humor in the dubbed version just doesn’t work. For instance, Seinfeld never caught on in Germany since the dubbed German version just sounded silly.
The No Name trilogy movies were only half dubbed. The American actors did their lines in English and got dubbed over in the Italian release and the Italian actors did their lines in Italian and got dubbed over in the English version. If you ever get a chance to watch The Good the Bad and the Ugly in Italian, it’s kind of an odd experience, since the poor dubbing has become sort of part of the aesthetic of the film, but in Italian it’s the iconic performances by the American actors that are off and all the Italians are perfectly synched.
All the German actors in Billy Wilder’s “One, Two, Three” also did their own lines in the German version, which is why it’s actually pretty good. I generally refuse to watch anything dubbed - thank God for DVDs and my favorite movie theater which caters mostly to tourists and only shows non-subtitled original versions of English movies.
I assume the opposite, since the countries in Europe that predominantly use dubbing are the larger language markets (France, Spain, Germany, Italy), while the smaller language areas (Dutch, Swedish, Finnish) “make do” with subtitling.
Another argument in favour of subtitling being cheap is that high-quality English-subtitled versions of Japanese TV dramas are available on the internet, the subtitling being provided by amateur fans.
However, the “one voice” dubbing that you mentioned (and that I mentioned in an earlier post) may indeed be very cheap.
Occasionally, the dubbed version is totally different from the original.
In the case of The Persuaders! (starring Roger Moore and Tony Curtis), the translation gained cult status in it’s own right:
Generally, no. Quite the opposite in fact.
Subtitling is done by translators working on their own, whereas dubbing necessarily involves translators+voice actors. In the case of swanky dubbing, where the voices are provided by famous local actors or professional voice actors, it can get very expensive very fast.
There’s also the simple equipment concern: I can (and do, professionally) dub a whole DVD in the comfort of my living room, then send it to the post-production guys so they’ll insert my subs overnight, make sure everything’s in sync and start pressing sellable DVDs immediately if that’s their plan. Dubbing however implies at least one trip to the sound booth (often multiple ones), and time in a professional sound studio is super expensive, as any musician will tell you. Even if the post-production company owns its own sound booth - in which case it still costs them all the time they could have rented it for.
Plus some additional time spent mixing the new audio with the old, checking audio levels & saturation & so forth. Here, again, a sound engineer’s time doesn’t come cheap.
That being said, sometimes it’s just the one bloke doing all the voices in a flat monotone - old soviet flicks are hilarious for this. In those cases, for all I know it’s the translator doing the dubbing by recording himself into a tape deck while on the john or something 
I’ve posted previously about the history of dubbing in Spanish and don’t feel like it, or like searching (actually I should be working, but I got sidetracked and need a break to re-center).
In Spanish you can get both very good dubbings and horrible ones; you can also get very good subtitling (according to the Spanish Subtitling Standard, which has some features that improve it a lot over foreign-made subtitles, see below) or standard subtitling.
Subtitles don’t necessarily follow the original any better than dubbing; often, subtitles are done from the script and not from the actors’ actual utterances (you can see this phenomenon in same-language subtitles as well). Also, if an actor talks a mile per minute, a dubber can and will (if any good) do so, whereas the subtitles will chop up what the character says.
Some features of the SSS which help a lot:
Keep in mind that Spaniards’ notions of “a normal speaking speed” is closer to Eva Longoria having a fight than Emma Thompson musing about the weather: Spain-made movies and programs get chopped up to Hell and back, if done outside the Spanish Standard.
Kind of a hijack, but the Japanese series “Samurai Pizza Cats” (an otherwise generic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles spoof) is famous for this in its English dub, which has absolutely nothing to do with the original Japanese dialog. The result was hilarious.
Supposedly, the Japanese crew even liked the English version better.
I think it’s a genre issue. Most non-English-language movies distributed in the United States are marketed as “art films” and the audience for that genre accepts and even prefers subtitling. I’m assuming that English-language art films are also subtitled when they’re distributed in foreign countries.
But a lot of American movies released in foreign countries are commercial movies - movies like The Avengers or Brave or 21 Jump Street. And this type of movie is not going to be subtitled.
The non-English-language equivalent of these movies are pretty rare. But when they do get distributed in the United States - movies like Das Boot or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Spirited Away - they get dubbed into English just as their American counterparts get dubbed into the native languages of other countries.
That said, there are exceptions. I was surprised that the action thriller Saving Private Perez was released in its original Spanish rather than being dubbed in English. But this may have reflected the fact that Spanish is becoming America’s second native language.
When Spirited Away was released here, some theaters has screens playing it subtitled and other screens playing it dubbed. But that’s pretty unusual.
No correlation. There used to be a time (decades ago) when the people more likely to attend an “Original version with subtitles” showing preferred artsy movies, but it’s not the case any more. Nowadays you can have the same movie showing in three different versions in the same multi-theater: regular (dubbed), 3D (dubbed and subtitled at different times) and original with subtitles. But then, nowadays TV gives you the option of watching the same foreign show in Spanish, in the original language, with subtitles in Spanish, with subtitles in the original language…
Japanese movies are often shown in Japanese with English subtitles, but that’s only because and until someone thinks there will be enough market to justify dubbing (which as far as I can remember happened only with Akira, which had originally been shown in a 40-seat theater in Barcelona).
Well, Channel 11 (public broadcast) has some shows in Arabic, almost universally subtitled in Hebrew. And channel 9 (Russian) often does not have Hebrew subtitles.
I’d phrase it as “only shows/movies targeting pre-schoolers are dubbed.” And even then, these movies (at least major movies during first run) will be offered in both dubbed and subtitled versions in the same theater, either on multiple screens if merited, or at alternate showing times (usually 50/50 or close enough to it in terms of distribution.)
It’s quite normal for **Hebrew **programs on TV to have Hebrew-language subtitles, which are not close-captioned and do not look to me like typical hearing-impaired captions (i.e., it’s just the dialog and nothing else.) I actually find them helpful if I’m multi-tasking (having a conversation at the same time) or just zoning. I enjoy English-language subtitles on English shows too, although as an English speaker I don’t need them.
OTOH, I HateHateHate dubbing, and I am eternally thankful that the kids learned to read early enough that I haven’t had to sit through a dubbed movie in over 10 years now…
I wouldn’t limit that to movies targeting pre-schoolers - after all, all Pixar films are dubbed (alongside non-dubbed versions), and while my 5-year-old enjoyed Up, I wouldn’t say that the film was targeted at him.
But yeah, I’m waiting for his reading skills to get good enough, too. Although I quite enjoy the dubbed versions of SpongeBob and Penguins of Madagascar (especially the latter, which I think is better than the original).
Really? That movie definitely has wide appeal, but as an animated PG-rated movie I would think they’d be missing out on a big chunk of their younger market playing it subtitled. Especially after Disney did such a good job on the English subtitled version.
I should have said “targeting (among others) pre-schoolers…” – any movie that is expected to bring in large numbers of families including pre-schoolers (but definitely not limited to them, and they may not be the primary intended audience) will normally have a dubbed version.