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Comment by throw93232 | Hacker News Reader

Poland is quite influenced by US, down to using american accent in spoken English. Neighbours are more influenced by UK.

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I always thought the accents in English were driven less by country and more by specific teachers. In France I taught a lot of college students in English and their accents varied a lot depending on who had taught them English. Some had perfect British accents, others clearly American.

In countries that do not dub their movies/TV (which I think both Poland and France do?) I imagine that has a huge influence.

And today probably even more so from youtube/twitch/tiktok/etc.

Oh man you are in for a treat :D So not only does Poland tend to have dubbing, they traditionally had a single "lektor" doing the dubbing in any given film or show. One guy, usually older, reading the Polish lines for all the characters. Here's a nice article on it, but there's a video after a few paragraphs if you just want to see what it's like.

https://www.chido-fajny.com/2017/10/polish-lektor-one-weirde...

Polish here and ... I hate dubbing! It's like buying a Lambo and changing it's wheels to the ones from ford fiesta ;-) It is still a Lambo, but something quite not ok. ;-) In a times when I did not know a single thing about English it still did matter to me to hear real actors as voice is not only a words, but entire different word of emotions expression and it is a different experience when you get immersed into movie by million dollars actor then one who gets a couple of thousand at most just for dubbing. Another thing is that dubbing always sounds very artificial. And it is not only because it is hard to lip sync one lang in another, but also because background sound (noises etc) are very very hard to recreate in dubbing environment so most of the times watching such a movies feels like putting your TV on mute and playing something else instead.

BUT... it is slowly changing in Poland. Movies and cartoons for kids and a lot of these aimed at kids and adults are dubbed nowadays.

Have you seen how German dubs are made? They're usually some of the best dubs (across all languages), but obviously still noticeably dubs.

Depending on the content it can sometimes come close to the original, it's definitely very different from a single person reading all lines in a neutral tone (which I personally consider absolutely horrible, and I'm very glad that Germany only uses that for interviews on the news)

> Germany only uses that for interviews on the news

Yeah UK news is the same - someone speaking over the original audio which is audible but played at a lower volume. At the risk of introducing yet another tangent here, there's a funny twist to this. A few decades back the UK bizarrely had rules that Gerry Adams' (leader of Sinn Fein) voice could not be used on media broadcasts[0]. So you'd see footage of him with another guy's voice dubbed over it[1]. This was even parodied in comedy news show The Day Today[2] to great effect :D

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988%E2%80%931994_British_broa...

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WQXQbDpIdY

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR6jGJ1lq2U

my dad (american) visited germany to work on his german skills and watched "The Big Lebowski". He said the Germans in the movie were given russian accents.

> They're usually some of the best dubs (across all languages), but obviously still noticeably dubs.

Maybe, but the issue is, that they now sound like German actors. Who suck. I’m German and I almost didn’t watch Dark because I expected it to be as unnatural sounding as any other German show. I’ve heard that it’s because actors here learn acting for theater instead of for TV, but I’m not sure if that explains it (amongst other things, because Dark did not have that issue).

IMO the best dubs are from the Nordic countries, those often speak English well enough that they just dub themselves, and that really shows in the quality of the dubbing. Israel is another country where I’ve heard great dubs by the actors themselves.

> BUT... it is slowly changing in Poland

This is good news, I can't imagine how frustrating it would be to watch a film that way. Czech versions supposedly have relatively good translations and dubbing, though I've not tried to watch anything other than The Simpsons. Interestingly there's a TV comedy about those responsible for the dubs: https://www.ceskatelevize.cz/porady/11104009943-dabing-stree...

My Polish friends lived in the USA for a decade but there were still times that they definitely had some UK pronunciations on words.

I think our teachers teach British English, American English is at most a side note during classes. No offense or so, but British sound to me personally like something that requires more effort thus kind of more "??sexy??" - if you know what I mean

It surely is, the infatuation in the 1990s must have been insane. I think Polish employers' treatment of workers is a product of that and high unemployment of that period. "Januszex" mentality is still going strong.

This was not true before the 2000s. British English was predominant, and may still be.

Netflix drives the accents nowadays.

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