Issue 157

Sounding Different - The Art of Dubbing

08th October 2007

What do David Duchovny, Keanu Reeves and Charlie Sheen have in common? Well, all of them sound the same - at least in German. The same can be said about Gillian Anderson, Demi Moore, Téa Leoni and Sharon Stone. The miracle lies in the art of synchronisation. And what might not be a common concept for the UK is a highly important business for non-English speaking countries: The art of dubbing movies.

There are many advantages of being a native English speaker. One of them certainly is the ability to understand the majority of movies, television films or series in the way they were released. A wide range of dialects within the English language offer more interesting dialogues and sometimes even make it harder to understand for native English speakers as well. But not everyone is gifted with a good understanding of English.

For this reason it is very important to dub films and series in to languages such as French, German, Italian, and Spanish. The German television market is very important for gaining ratings, even for shows made in the USA. German broadcasting channels (e.g. ProSiebenSat.1 Media Group) can be received in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Luxembourg and therefore have an important effect on ratings. Even so, the success of a film or series is ultimately judged on its ratings in its native country. For example, Star Trek Enterprise was hugely successful in Germany but nevertheless as the show was losing ratings in the USA, it was cancelled after just four seasons, whereas Star Trek The Next Generation went on to make many series.

The work of a dubbing speaker is complex. The right words have to fit according to the lips of the actor and also the voice has to portray the mood and temper of the original. In German speaking countries, the process of synchronising a movie or a series, results in a final product which is released with a very professional and accurate accent-free high-German. Therefore, what ever accent the original actors have is completely lost to the German viewer.

What do David Duchovny, Keanu Reeves and Charlie Sheen have in common? Well, all of them sound the same - at least in German. The same can be said about Gillian Anderson, Demi Moore, Téa Leoni and Sharon Stone. The miracle lies in the art of synchronisation. And what might not be a common concept for the UK is a highly important business for non-English speaking countries: The art of dubbing movies.

However, as German and English are related languages and many words do sound a lot alike it makes the work of German dubbing speakers easier then the one of French or Spanish dubbing speakers.

Certainly the biggest disadvantage of dubbing is that a lot of dialogues which are funny, sad, melodramatic or just useless lose a lot of their intensity while being translated. The same principle can be adapted to German movies dubbed into other languages. The most successful German movie of the last 30 years is called "Der Schuh des Manitu" ("The Shoe of the Manitou") and the funniest part of this hilarious comedy is the Bavarian dialect of the actors, which is an important feature and part of the movie's success. The DVD of this particular movie was also released with a dubbed Oxford English version, which took large parts away of what the movie was actually about.

In some cases, especially for documentaries, it is often too expensive to synchronise them. These programmes are released with subtitles, which is a translated synopsis of what the actors say in the original version. But there is a cultural difference in the popularity of subtitled films. In Germany, subtitled movies are not very well accepted. However, in Switzerland subtitled movies can count on a wide audience, especially among young people who learn English at school. Many Swiss cinemas release subtitled blockbuster movies (German and French) as the audience demands (and prefers) the movie with its original voices.

Andrea Baumgartner-Ledger