Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

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>We will watch the original instead, dubbed movies don't have a soul

I disagree. It's all about the quality of the voice actors and the effort put into localisation.

Having grown up on Dutch dubs of many cartoons, I honestly find the Dutch voice actor of Spongebob better than the original. I'm missing the extra energy that the Dutch VA seems to have put into the voice when I hear the original, even if the original is very good. Though text on screen isn't translated, puns and references are, sometimes overhauled completely.

The talent pool for Dutch voice actors isn't as big as I would've liked (you often hear the same five VAs in every show on a given channel), but some of them really put in the work. Many of them only do kids TV and commercials (really freaked me out to hear Ash Ketchum try to sell me soap one day) and not every VA is as good/paid enough/gets decent scripts, but there are some real gems to be found in dubs.

Last year I found out how Ukrainian dubs work and I was astounded by how weird the experience was. I'm used to dubs having only the voice track swapped out, but the Ukrainian shows seemed to just have the acties talk over the original show, like this AI tool does, and I honestly can't imagine ever getting into a show that's dubbed like that. I assume people get used to this, but I found it rather annoying.

Blanket statements like "dubs have no soul" serve nobody. There are good dubs and there are bad dubs, and the ratio will probably differ depending on the language you're talking about. Dismissing all dubs ignores the real heart and soul some dubbing teams have put into their works. That doesn't mean I disagree with the idea of exposing kids to more languages, but I wouldn't expect kids to learn much from just TV shows and movies in the first place.

Voices in dubbed movies don't have any depth, for instance.

That doesn't have anything to do with the quality of the voice actors. Everything sounds flat because that is just how they record it.

Dubbing is a useful convenience, an accessibility feature (even if it wasn't born that way). But they have way less soul.

I guess we just disagree, or maybe you're used to worse dubs than I am. There's nothing inherently flat about dubbing at all. In fact, in many (older) movies and shows, actors would dub over themselves to get better audio.

In a movie, if a character is far away, their voice comes from far away. Voice actors always have the mic in front of them, so their voices always come from the same place, not relative to the scene. That's what I meant.

I also think it is beautiful to hear the sound of the original language, particularly if it is one I am not used to. It's part of the charm.

I have grown up with dubs, thou, so I understand you. But once one gets used to no dubs, there is no way back. It's like removing sugar from the coffee.

I think the main point is that small kids get the basic building blocks for learning languages from anything they hear (even if they don't understand it yet), so listening to as many languages as possible when they are young will make learning languages easier for them later in their lives.

I've heard this argument before, mostly from companies trying to sell language courses for kids. As far as I know it's true that kids pick up on languages much easier when they're young, but I'm not so sure those skills will stick if all they can converse with are the TV. That's quite different from having a speaking partner such as a teacher or a bilingual parent. I suspect this is why shows like Dora the Explorer are set up like an interactive game.

I myself have been exposed to subtitled English shows and movies all my life (not every show or movie was dubbed, and there were some German shows that made it through as well) but I don't think I actually started speaking any English until I needed it to interact with strangers in Runescape, while at the same time I stopped watching any dubbed shows. Almost all of the content I consumed became English language content.

Almost passively learning a language by enveloping oneself in it works (though actual study will help you advance quicker), but you need more than TV. I can't find the actual paper I read on this once (thanks, SEO spam!) but as I recall, the biggest advantage kids have to is learn pronunciation without an accent; picking up vocabulary and grammar don't seem to be too affected by age from what I recall.

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