Germany dubbing actor sues Disney ! (Fluch der Karibik“: Warum Captain Jack seine Stimme verlor)

http://www.thelocal.de/society/20110809-36851.html

Johnny Depps Synchronsprecher Marcus Off liegt im Streit mit Disney.

The voiceover artist who dubbed US star Johnny Depp for the Jack Sparrow character in the German release of "Pirates of the Caribbean" is suing film studio Disney, claiming his contribution to the role is underappreciated.

In what could be a watershed for Germany’s legion of dubbing artists, Marcus Off, 53, is demanding €180,000 for his voiceover performance – about 10 times what he was actually paid, the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung reported Tuesday.

Off has been in a dispute over the issue with the German arm of Disney since 2008. His case is now about to reach the Federal Court where he will argue in effect that he is the part creator of the hugely successful films and therefore is entitled to a share of the massive profits.

“Doing voiceover is acting, plain and simple, even if you only hear the voice,” Off told the paper.

Off’s voice has featured in hundreds of foreign films dubbed into German for cinema and television. He is the German voice of such stars as Ralph Fiennes, Sean Penn and British actor Michael Sheen.

The actor did the German voice for Johnny Depp’s memorable character Captain Jack Sparrow in the first three instalments of the "Pirates" franchise, which have been seen by an estimated 19.5 million people in German cinemas.

Indeed the films have been a phenomenal success worldwide, grossing more than €2.1 billion. The second installment, "Dead Man’s Chest," is the fifth highest-grossing film ever, according to the website Box Office Mojo.

Off claims that his contribution has been important to the films' success in Germany.

He was paid a total of €9,306.14 for his performances in all three, plus a further €8,650 for dubbing the DVD bonus material and TV ads. These sums are well above the standard rate for voiceovers.

Disney has refused his demands and has used another voiceover artist for the fourth film, "On Stranger Tides," prompting an internet petition by Off’s fans in Germany.

The case will soon go to the Federal Court, though Off has already lost a case before a Berlin court in June, for which he had to pay legal costs.

The outcome could be a precedent for the sizeable dubbing industry. Unlike many European countries, Germany foreign films and television are dubbed into German rather than running in their original language.

The IVS dubbing artists association, which has nearly 300 members, is supporting Off in his claim and is paying his legal costs, up to €20,000, according to Off.

Off is basing his complaint on a paragraph of the 2002 copyright law, called the “fairness paragraph,” which deals with adequate compensation. The paragraph enables an author to press for an additional claim from the publisher of a work if there is a “demonstrable discrepancy” between the agreed payment to the author and the eventual earnings from the work.

The federal court ruled in January that a publisher needed to ensure the translator of a non-fiction book was adequately compensated based on the sales of the work.

Off argues that he has not been adequately compensated given the massive success of the "Pirates" films. The question, then, is whether a voiceover artist can be considered on par with an author.

Disney does not believe so. In its original response to Off’s complaint, it argued that voiceover actors should be considered no differently than news or radio announcers, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

“In some ways, voiceover speakers make even less of a creative contribution, because they simply imitate the voice and speech of an actor who has already given the text a dramaturgical value,” Disney argued.

However, Off was brought in for the first installment only after Disney had rejected the interpretation by another German Depp-dubber, David Nathan, suggesting the issue is not entirely straightforward.

http://www.merkur-online.de/nachrichten/kultur/fluch-karibik-captain-jack-synchronsprecher-ausgetauscht-mm-1245750.html

Films no longer have to be dubbed or subtitled into Ukrainian

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ukraine-ditches-controversial-dubbing-regulations-35092

MOSCOW -- The lifting of controversial dubbing regulations in Ukraine is likely to benefit Russian distributors.

Earlier this week, Ukraine's culture and tourism minister, Mikhail Kulinyaka, told reporters in Kiev that a regulation requiring that all movies slated for a theatrical release in the country, should be either dubbed or subtitled into Ukrainian, is no longer in force.

The regulation, which came into effect in early 2008, created a lot of controversy, especially in Ukraine's predominantly Russian-speaking eastern part, hitting those distributors which until then used Russian-language film copies. A few theaters even went on strike, protesting against the regulation, and there were reports about some theaters going out of business.

Now, Russian distributors operating in Ukraine will be able to save costs by again using Russian-language film copies. "There is a lot of Russian interest in the country, and what this is all about is re-distribution of revenues," Ukrainian television producer Igor Kondratyuk told Kommersant-Ukraine.

dubbing | film dubbing

To dub? Or to sub-title?
http://www.pi-consulting.com/2008/09/01/%e2%80%9cdub-titling%e2%80%9d-for-spanish-speakers/
Movies on TV are supposed to be entertaining, and Spanish-speaking viewers don’t feel they should have to work too hard at having a good time. For mainstream American audiences, of course, the question scarcely arises, since foreign-language movies from beyond the US domestic market only hit the national consciousness with extreme rarity, if at all.
Views can vary in the dubbing vs. titles debate. In Latin America, for instance, large numbers of the films and TV shows aired are American in origin, but preferences for translation formats are far from uniform. Overall, dubbing seems to win by a comfortable margin. However, a surprising number of TV viewers and moviegoers in Argentina and Mexico say they prefer the original English soundtrack, and reading the sub-titles. This seems to correlate with (a) a higher proportion of the population professing to speak English, and (b) a sense of pride in taking Anglo-Saxon cultures on board undiluted. Upscale Mexicans, for instance, will be at pains to seem comfortable with Hollywood Americanisms in the original English. For their part, Argentineans notoriously regard themselves as more European than the Europeans. In Buenos Aires, the overwhelming practice in movie theatres is to show foreign films in their original version, with Spanish subtitles only provided for those ‘ignorant’ enough need them.
Curiously, in Brazil they tend to ‘dub-title’ movies, i.e. viewers get much English-language material dubbed into Spanish, with Portuguese subtitles added as well. This can get ferociously confusing. Your Pi blogmeister has sat on planes to Rio or São Paulo, and realized that the two simultaneous translations of the in-flight movie not only mis-represent the English original, but are also totally different from each other.
With dubbing, something always seems to get lost in the translation, and the quality of the movie-watching experience can suffer. Puerto Rican viewers, many of whom are bi-lingual in Spanish and English, complain that Hollywood fare dubbed into Spanish is often so badly done that the movies and series seem more like parodies of themselves. The same voice-over artists’ voices come back, thinly disguised, again and again. “It’s awful”, says one viewer in San Juan. “Serious programs come across as screamingly funny, while supposedly funny ones simply aren’t”. Sounds like “The Unwatchables”.