Opinion

The fine art of dubbing

By Joseph LaPenta

The English verb "dub" has many meanings but perhaps the most common one occurs in the phrase, "to dub a film." Here, it means to replace the existing soundtrack of a film with another one in a different language. In Japan, this kind of dubbing - usually from English to Japanese - has been developed into a fine art.

When I first came to this country, there was almost no broadcasting in English, and that was fine with me. I was studying Japanese and the less English I was tempted to listen to, the better. But in the late 1970s, Japan's television stations began bilingual broadcasts of news and movies in English. I will never forget the time I first listened to the television detective drama "Colombo" in Japanese. I could hardly believe my ears! The voice of the star was so convincing that for a split second I thought the American actor Peter Falk had somehow learned to speak Japanese.

Audiences in Japan take such excellent dubbing for granted, but the dubbing of films that aren't in English into English has always been of very poor quality. In the past, the voices usually sounded dead, and the words and lip movements were often out of synch. These days, the only Japanese films dubbed into English are animated films. It now seems that the greatest compliment Hollywood can pay a foreign film is to remake it, as was recently done with "Solaris" and "Ring."

The main reason for the low priority placed on dubbing in English-speaking countries is that the United States produces such a huge percentage of the world's films. Japan and other countries are currently flooded with Hollywood films and television series from the United States, and their own domestic industries have a great deal of trouble competing. While films can be subtitled in theaters, dubbing is a must for television.

As students of English, you can learn a lot from watching dubbed films on Japanese television. You can record both soundtracks, listen to sections in English, and then play them back in Japanese to check your comprehension. DVDs make the process of switching from one language to another even easier.

Cultural differences can become apparent in the dubbing process. Young women's voices, for example, are often an octave or two higher than their English originals, and they sometimes have that idiotic, infantile quality that is considered "cute" in Japan.

Writers must also invent new, artificial expressions to translate things Japanese people would never say - at least, not on television. For example, Americans tend to speak much more frankly about sex in all its various forms. So it is understandable that the Japanese versions of situation comedies like "Friends" or "Ally McBeal" are full of euphemisms and Japanized English that I think few viewers would understand. In some cases, the translators give up entirely, cutting words or whole lines, and substituting some words with more "acceptable" words. Yes, it is a kind of censorship, but that's even more reason to listen to the original English and hear the real thing.

Shukan ST: Feb. 21, 2003

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