Voices

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Several years ago I had the opportunity to sit in on a lecture given by some guy at Disney who was in charge of character consistency. Besides other things, his job was to make sure that the voice of Nemo in Spanish sounded like the same Nemo in English movies, the same in German, etc., etc.

At the time I thought that was a nice touch of quality control.

But now I consider it a sanity saving job.

I just listened to a Spanish translation of a talk the founder of my NPO gave. I stopped the tape several times just to shake my head at hearing the very characteristic words of Ms. Founder coming out of someone's mouth in Spanish. To make it even more mind-twisting, it was a man who was translating.

Comments

Matthew Carroll said…
When I was living in Stuttgart, I was completely amazed to discover that Angela Lansbury speaks flawless German.

Apparently in Germany there is dedicated voice talent for each major Hollywood actor, whose job is to be his or her dubbed voice. And it's big business in Germany. They even speed up or slow down the video nearly undetectable amounts to make the mouth movements sync with the sounds, and not just in major movie productions, but in your regular TV serials as well.

Contrast this with most movies translated, at least until recently, into Russian -- the first movie I saw in Russian was "Ghost". It didn't matter whether it was Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore or Whoopi Goldberg speaking, they had one man speaking non-stop in perfect monotone throughout the entire film translating right over the top of the English dialog.
6:13 AM
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