Some people might think that it is so much better not to have to read subtitles of foreign films, when dubbed versions are readily available, but I definitely am not in their number. If a movie is announced as dubbed, I start running the other way; to me, a subtitled product is preferable to a dubbed one, ten times over. Let me take you through my reasoning and then you may tell me if I am too off the mark on this.

Dubbing vs. subtitling in Europe and Latin America - A short rundown

In the film making industry, dubbing mostly refers to recorded voices that replace the voices of original actors and speak the local language of the target market, with the purpose of making them more widely accessible to the general public. However, geographical preferences on dubbing vs. subtitling differ greatly, while not appearing to have any discernible cause. Just so that you have a rough idea, in Russia, France, Germany, Spain and Italy, the general practice is dubbing, with virtually no chance to watch movies in their original versions. Before the advent of digital pay-TV and multi-language audio track DVDs, subtitled versions were considered in these countries almost an exclusive elite product for the artsy-intellectual circles. In Latin America on the other hand, (excepting Brazil) mostly all foreign-language programs, films, cartoons and documentaries shown in free-aired TV channels are dubbed into Neutral Spanish, whereas cable and satellite TV films may be either dubbed or subtitled, or both.

In my home country, Uruguay, luckily the majority of cable TV shows, films and series are subtitled, as are all foreign motion pictures shown in theaters - maybe with the exception of children's movies and cartoons. As of late, you can also get to see on cable TV the same shows either dubbed or subtitled, depending on the airing time. Whenever my zapping finger hits a dubbed series or movie, I move on, and this is why.

First, it is quite irritating having to listen to actors and actresses who you know how their own true voices sound like - speak with other voices, in Colombian, Mexican or Neutral Spanish accents. It has quite a dissociative effect.

Second, and maybe this is just a professional quirk of mine - being as I am a translator of English and Spanish - I love to listen to and identify the different accents, whether a singsong Irish brogue, a rolling Glasgow burr, a slow Southern drawl or the particular accents of the different American minority groups. When dubbed, these differences disappear, are diluted, or when attempted on the soundtrack, sound like badly spoken Spanish, detracting as a result from the general value of the film.

Third, and here we come to the crux of the matter: how can I be sure that the dubbed version is correct, after witnessing, day in, day out, gross translation "horrors" in subtitles? Let me give you just a couple of examples:

Closeout

"The Mentalist" is, as you probably know, a successful procedural crime TV series airing this year in the U.S. at CBS for the second season, with Simon Baker cast in the role of mentalist Patrick Jane. In one of the first season episodes, a young woman says, when questioned in the course of an investigation, that "when my husband came back [from the war] he closed me out". The subtitle read: "cuando mi esposo volvió [de la guerra] me liquidó". A closeout is indeed a "liquidación", or, as any passably good dictionary will tell you, "the selling of all the merchandise in a store (generally because a store is closing)". Therefore, it can also be translated as "cierre", to signify that a business or firm is closing down, or going out of business. This was, as you will certainly have deduced by now, not the type of closeout referred to by the young woman, who had been shut out, ignored, or excluded by her homecoming spouse. The correct translation should have been, instead, "me excluyó", or "se alejó de mí", or "dejó de hablarme". To further complicate the issue, "liquidar" in Spanish has another connotation; in criminal contexts it can be construed as to kill, wipe out, terminate...you get the general drift. Hence, this was not only a mistranslation, untrue to the intended meaning of the original version, but one that could completely mislead the viewer.

Wrongful death

"Reservation Road". This Focus Features and Random House Films motion picture, starring Marc Ruffalo and Joaquin Phoenix, is a moving drama touching on revenge and redemption. In one of its scenes, a reference is made to "wrongful death". This was translated in the subtitle, no less, as "muerte equivocada" (which in backtranslation would amount to "mistaken (or erroneous) death". My legal background made me laugh out loud. A "wrongful death [action]", as any good legal dictionary will tell you, is "a lawsuit brought on behalf of a decedent's survivors for their damages resulting from a tortious injury that caused the decedent's death". [Black's Law Dictionary, 3rd. Pocket Ed., 2006, p. 788]. Exactly the situation depicted in the movie. And in legal Spanish criminal law terminology, there is a very precise equivalent for "wrongful death": "muerte causada por homicidio culposo". Nothing whatever even closely related to a "mistaken death"......




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