Dubs never get the tone of the acting right IMO.
Dubs has inevitably to chase the original language. I'm italian, we generally suck at english and we generally have a lot great actors and also voice actors, so growing up seeing dubbed movies was the normal thing for me and everyone else. It's still the normality in cinema, we see everything dubbed, I wouldn't even know where to start to look for movie theaters that play movies in original language, they do exist but I never see them advertised.
Once I was fluent enough to understand english movies, I did the switch and basically there was no turning back. Sure, the actual performance of an actor impersonating another can be good, we have many actors very good at that, but there's no performance good enough that can replace the fact that a dubbing has to chase and work around the original language and line, thus ruining all its charm. Different languages, different grammar rules, different ways to construct the sentence, and that weighs down a lot in a dub.
For example, in the english language you say "All I want is you", but in italian we don't say that. The way we phrase it can be literally translated back into "I don't want anything else than you". Every language has different grammar and so a dubbing never compares to the original.
Also, jokes get completely lost. Think of the Hodor thing in Game of Thrones. I remember the first time that I laughed a lot on How I Met your Mother, and decided to stick with it, was when the protagonist was trying clumsily to dump a girl and was saying that the situation was "ineffable", with the girl asking back "so, I'm not F-able?".... how do you even start to translate that???
Also, thank the gods for having watched Breaking Bad in the original language. Dou remember the iconic "I am the one the knocks" line? I shit you not, in italian for whatever reason it became "a guy open the door and gets shot and you think that's me? no, they cannot shoot me". Ouch.
And since I'm on a rant, let me recoil in horror at the idea of the Futurama episode of the were-car. You know how it was translated? "the car that was". Because they didn't get that were-car was a play on werewolf, they took it as the past tense of the verb be.
Topic: What Shows are you currently watching? (Read 218479 times)
