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Subtitles

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When deciding for a movie to watch, I rarely find an interesting movie in my native language - and now, as a Swedish man living abroad, it's even more rare than when I lived in my home country. For this reason, I'm used to watching movies with foreign language origin, and have had the chance to watch for example Chinese movies dubbed to German, French to English and American to Swedish, while growing up with subtitles for most TV shows not directed toward young children or retired people. From this experience, having all the time in the world trying to understand why it's so common to dub foreign language movies, I still don't understand the charm it gives the viewer to watch a dubbed movie.

Movies with subtitle still contain all the original movement, feelings, voice tremblings and many many other things which the original actors do in their original voices, giving the feeling the director wants. Some movies are shot for years just so the voices can be good enough for the movie. This is another reason why not to use dubbing - I've never heard a dubbed movie with the right feeling in the voice, instead of some monotone 'voice actor on the 9-to-5 job'...

If you need more reasons for subtitles instead of dubbing, I would like you to think of languages, and having the sense of languages and words. If you only ever hear your own language being spoken and written, you have less of a chance to understand (and even smaller chance of learning to speak) another language. I can understand why some people of greater nations than the Scandinavian countries where I've spent more than half of my life might protest with a "English will always be understood everywhere, look at Internet!" or similar - but don't forget the globalization around the corner; If you want to reach something in life, you need to communicate, and if then another language starts becoming important in the world of trade where will you be?

If you still decide to find what has been written so far in this article utter nonsense, I would like you to think of understanding your own language. For example, English is somewhat of a mix based on various germanic languages (German tribes and then the Vikings invaded the brittish isles once in a while during the first 1000-1500 years A.C. after all), latin based languages (Ancient Rome reached England, and in the 'good old medievals', the French and Britons were always either fighting or loving each other, but could always speak together in a few common words, if we simplify history)

As a last note, Scandinavian children often learn foreign languages even before starting school, as a result of watching TV and movies. Germans, the French, the English speaking crowd and the Spanish rarely learn any foreign language before they feel forced, either by school or later in work situations....

So, could someone please explain the positive effect of dubbing to me? The only positive part to me is that you can bring the three year old to a movie without having to explain the content...

Learn more about this author, Emil Hunefalk.
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