Chinese develop a foreign ear

Chinese develop a foreign ear

By Xu Jitao
Shanghai Star. 2004-08-05
http://www.shanghai-star.com.cn/2004/0805/cu18-1.html

MOST Chinese born before the 1980s have deep impressions of dubbed movie classics such as "Jane Eyre", "Waterloo Bridge" and others. They remember it as natural that the exotic heroes or heroines in the movie would speak Chinese: they are very accustomed to the voices that belong to dubbing artists. As far as those audiences were concerned, the heroes and heroines in the movies were foreigners who happened to speak Chinese.

Glory history

The Shanghai Film Dubbing Studio has been the most important place for the emergence of an industry based on translating and dubbing films into Chinese. Before 1949, there were no dubbed films in China: the audiences had to read pamphlets telling about the content of the films, or subtitles presented by slideshow, if they wanted to understand foreign films. Otherwise audiences had to listen to commentators explaining what the films were trying to say. Only a few cinemas were equipped with earphones through which to hear interpreters translating the dialogues in the films for the audiences. This was obviously inconvenient for Chinese audiences who were trying to familiarize themselves with brand-new foreign movies.
In November 1949, after the Shanghai Films Studio had been founded, a department for film dubbing was added. On April 1, 1957, the translating and dubbing films department of the Shanghai Films Studio became an independent organization and its name was accordingly changed to the "Shanghai Film Dubbing Studio". From then on, it became the only professional translating and dubbing studio for foreign films in China.

During the past 47 years, the studio has introduced more than 1,000
foreign movies into China from roughly 50 countries.
Among these films, there are many classics that have influenced generations of Chinese, such as "Death on the Nile", "Zorro" and "La Tulipe Noire". In the memories of most Chinese audiences, Peter Ustinov, Alan Delon, Vivien Leigh or Robert Taylor are always associated with the attractive voices of Bi Ke, Tong Zirong, Liu Guangning or Qiao Zhen.
It would have been awkward for these audiences to accept such heroes or heroines speaking in foreign language on the screen. Dubbed voices have replaced the original voices of the actors or actresses and become an inseparable parts of these movie classics.

Lost flavour

But the trend has changed, especially in cities such as Shanghai. More and more young men have begun to take the original foreign films with subtitles as their first choice when they decide to go to cinema. For them, dubbed films lost their attractions long ago.
In 2001, when "Pearl Harbour" was imported into China, Shanghai took five original copies of the movie out of 10 and became the city to import the most original copies in China. Most people chose the undubbed one when they decided to watch the movie.
According to the Shanghai Youth Daily's interview with a young actress, Yan Xiaopin, after she had watched the original copy of Pearl Harbor, she felt that dubbing would have harmed the original dialogue and the subtle performance of the actors and actresses.
Zhou Liming, a film reviewer who lives in America, had commented that dubbing jeopardized the original films: dubbing makes the dialogue in the films become awkward; the original soundtrack gets lost in the dubbed version of the films; and the audiences lose their chance to learn and understand foreign language and culture in a direct way.
So the comments cited above by the young actress and the film reviewer can be taken as representative of people's attitudes in Shanghai towards the dubbing of films. What concerns them most is that the films' original soundtracks and actors' performances may be jeopardized by the dubbing. It seems reasonable, but in fact, it involves great prejudices and misunderstandings about the dubbing of films.
As the leading and only independent film-dubbing studio in China, the
Shanghai Film Dubbing Studio has a first-class sound effects studio that is the equal of the great studios in Hollywood. According to the chief of the Shanghai Film Dubbing Studio, in recent years, they have imported the most advanced sound effects equipment to keep up with the development of sound technologies elsewhere in the world. What they have done in their studio while dubbing films is just the same as the sound engineers did for the original films.

Post-colonial voices

On the other hand, the dubbing work doesn't alter the characters in the original films. Quite the opposite, it helps audiences to understand the characters in the films better. "I don't believe that everyone who goes to the cinema knows foreign languages and also I don't believe that they can catch every word that the characters say in the original films, because it's even a tough task even for the professionals in our studio to catch all the words that the characters say in these films," said the chief of the Shanghai Film Dubbing Studio.
So why do people choose to watch the original films? This is a complicated question and what lies behind this tide may be the global wave of post-colonialism: with the languages and cultures of the developed countries dominating the daily lives of people in developing countries.
In his review article, Zhou Liming said that watching dubbed films shows audiences have no taste and are "illiterate". This kind of opinions may indicate what many Chinese think in the context of post-colonialism.
"It's natural for people to follow the cultures of developed countries today. But we cannot ignore the side-effects that this wave brings. For people who do not know foreign languages in most rural areas, the decline of the dubbing of films is not fair," said Liu Yong, an independent film reviewer.
Another concern is the connection between piracy and the high cost of movie tickets. The accessibility of the latest pirated movies and their low price are in sharp contrast with the relative rarity and high expense of foreign movies put on in the cinemas. "I think maybe a relatively lower price would bring more audiences back to the cinemas," said the chief of the Shanghai Film Dubbing Studio. "Maybe our dubbed films would benefit from this."

Film distributors weary of Ukrainian language requirement

Ukrainian currency


Film distributors weary of Ukrainian language requirement
http://5tv.com.ua/eng/newsline/182/0/20199/


Some film distributors are worried that the government’s plan to phase-in Ukrainian language dubbing and subtitles will hurt the industry. Representatives of government and film distribution gathered for a roundtable discussion in Kyiv on Thursday. According to the governmental plan announced earlier this month, by September of this year, 20% of foreign movies projected in theaters across the country should be dubbed or subtitled using the Ukrainian language.

The plan eventually calls for 70% of all movies to be in Ukrainian. Representatives from the “Association for Developing Cinema” spoke on behalf of the distributors and said the government plan will cost too much and complained that there are not enough facilities in the country for dubbing and subtitling. They claim that dubbing one film into Ukrainian will cost up to 300,000 hryvnia, the equivalent of 60 thousand dollars. Association president Mykhailo Sokolov said that film distributors only gross 150 million hryvnia annually and the new language requirement will end up costing 50 million hryvnia every year. He also said that the dubbing will introduce a month long delay to the premiers of movies in Ukraine.

Vice premier Vyacheslav Kyrylenko, who introduced the measure, said that he does not understand why distributors are willing to pay for the dubbing movies into Russian, but refuse to pay for Ukrainian language translation.

High school students call for reintroduction of non- dubbed cartoons

Tweety


High school students call for reintroduction of non- dubbed cartoons
http://www.daily-news.ro/article_detail.php?idarticle=21640
Otilia Haraga

"Save Tweety!" is a petition urging the reintroduction of cartoons in the English language on the specialized animation channels. The petition has been posted on the internet by a group of high school students from Bacau, and about 3,000 people had signed it by Thursday at noon, according to the daily Ziarul Clujeanului.

Tweety, the little chicken from cartoons, was chosen as a symbol for a protest initiated by a group of high school students discontented with the dubbing into Romanian of several "classic" cartoon series such as Tweety, Tom and Jerry or The Flintstones. Initiated by pupils and teachers of the Ferdinand I National College in Bacau, the petition was sent to the Ministry of Education and also the Ministry of Culture.

The pupils are demanding a return to the model in which the original voices are in English with subtitles in Romanian. The document was posted on the internet at the address http://www.savetweety.lx.ro/ and lovers of cartoons in the "original" form are invited to support it. Over 400 supporters had registered on Wednesday over the course of several hours, most of them emphasizing the benefits of cartoons in English in helping small children to learn the language.

"I grew up with cartoons in English and honestly they were a big help. I learnt English more from television then I have and will learn from school," said one of the signatories, Gabriel Samfira. Adopting the Western model, the Cartoon Network channel has followed its standard policy of dubbing voices into the official language of the country in an effort to make the cartoons more accessible to children

Czech/Slovak

Language split sees Czechs, Slovaks talk in tongues

Czech/Slovak Presidents


Language split sees Czechs, Slovaks talk in tongues
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-01-12T031340Z_01_KWA211557_RTRUKOC_0_UK-CZECH-LANGUAGE.xml&archived=False

By Matt Reynolds
PRAGUE (Reuters) -

Ivana Formanova loves watching old movies. But when a film from the former Czechoslovakia comes on in the Slovak language, she quickly switches channels."I don't really understand it. It's too hard to sit and watch and figure out what they are saying," the 15-year-old Czech, born in the former Czechoslovakia, says.
The Slovak and Czech languages have so much in common that Czechoslovak officials once considered them two versions of the same tongue.But 13 years after Czechoslovakia split into the independent Czech and Slovak republics, the ties that bind the two languages are fraying. Some experts believe the day will come when Czechs will barely comprehend their Slavic neighbours.
"I think Slovaks felt Czechs would always understand us," said Mira Nabelkova, a Slovak linguist at Charles University in the Czech capital Prague.
Mindful of young people like Formanova, Czech television executives decided last year to begin dubbing Slovak shows into Czech. Many middle-aged and older Czechs were outraged and articles criticising the move appeared in the national press.The executives justified their decision by citing studies that show 30 percent of Czech teenagers and young adults have trouble understanding Slovak entertainment."The more you meet people, especially children, who have difficulty understanding, the more you realise how different the languages are," Nabelkova said.

TWO TONGUES
Czech and Slovak are the closest of the Western Slavic languages, which include Polish and Sorbian, but 15 percent of their vocabularies and about half their noun endings differ.
From 1918 to 1993, Czechoslovakia's bilingual state media made overcoming these differences easy for anyone with a radio or television.
Slovaks still watch Czech television and read newspapers from their bigger neighbour, and many say they barely notice whether a book or film is in Czech or Slovak.
But in the Czech Republic, Slovak television has all but disappeared, Slovak press is sold at only a few fringe shops, and most of the 200,000 Slovak residents speak Czech.
"Young Czechs have few opportunities to hear Slovak," said Nada Vokusova, president of the Slovak-Czech Club, which prints journals and magazines in both languages.
"When they grow up, they may understand Slovaks like they understand Poles, about 70 percent when they concentrate."
Having grown up in Czechoslovakia, adult Czechs are surprised to find their children cannot understand Slovak."My generation understood it absolutely no problem," said Jan Prokop, a Czech journalist who served for two years at an army base in what is now Slovakia when he was younger.Prokop's 10-year-old daughter, Olivia, is a child prodigy of mini-golf -- three-time junior champion at the World Championship and four-time junior champion at the U.S. open.
Last year, Prokop sent her onstage to answer questions at a post-tournament banquet in Arizona with a Slovak-American translator."He translated one question. Olivia just stood there. He translated another," Prokop said. "No answer. I finally realised she wasn't scared, she just didn't get it."

DRIFTING APART
A Slovak asking for beer or cigarettes in one of Prague's famous pubs will have no problem. The words are the same.But young waiters are often baffled by requests for foods that sound totally different in Slovak, such as cabbage soup.Cabbage is 'zeli' in Czech and 'kapusta' in Slovak.
Despite such differences, broad language similarities helped unite Czechs and Slovaks after the Austro-Hungarian empire collapsed following World War One, when Czechoslovakia was formed.Linguists debated whether the languages should be considered separate at all. For a time, Czechoslovakia's official language was Czechoslovak, with two separate standards, Czech and Slovak.
State television and radio broadcast in both languages, and they grew even closer. Czech expressions entered Slovak usage, and the late Communist leader Gustav Husak, a Slovak who lived in Prague, spoke a goulash of the two tongues.
Czech linguist Marian Sloboda says the growing divide between the languages has eroded the solidarity that developed between Czechs and Slovaks over 70 years.
"A few years ago, some Czech students were unhappy that Slovak students were getting spots in Czech dorms," she said.
"It was clear they viewed Slovaks as 'them' rather than 'us' ... The Slovak language fading in the Czech Republic will increase that feeling, the feeling that 'they' Slovaks are different from 'us' Czechs."

(Additional reporting by Alan Crosby)

© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.