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When I was in Poland, some American-made TV shows and movies were on the tube. To my surprise, one male voice did all the dubbing, for all the characters - old, young, male, female. The dubbing man made no attempts to change his voice depending on which character was speaking. I found that a bit odd, so when I returned to Prague, I asked a student about American-made movies and television shows dubbed in Czech.
He revealed to me that when Communism first fell, there was an influx of western media into the Czech Republic. But hardly anyone here spoke English, as Russian was taught in schools. Add to that the very steep price of any sort of video or audio recording equipment, translators were in high demand. So people made good money sitting at their kitchen table with a crappy tape recorder dubbing the Czech version of countless English videos.
My student went on to inform me that the most popular genre of movies was pornography. Because religion is not a large part of Czech life (the largest block of people in the nation, when broken down by religion, is no religion at all), there doesn't exist the conflicts between religious and social acceptances that plagues America and other nations. So the first large batch of western adult videos to be translated into Czech was translated by a sole male, sitting at his kitchen table. Imagine, for a moment, watching an adult video with only one, dull, monotonic voice doing all the dubbing... "yes." "do you like that?" "yes i do. that's great baby."
These days, that's a running joke here, and it's even been used to advertise for English lessons.
On a completely different note, I have to say that quaint is nice. European is nice. Old school is nice. But jebus, cobblestone is frickin' slippery when it has snow on it!
cau
He revealed to me that when Communism first fell, there was an influx of western media into the Czech Republic. But hardly anyone here spoke English, as Russian was taught in schools. Add to that the very steep price of any sort of video or audio recording equipment, translators were in high demand. So people made good money sitting at their kitchen table with a crappy tape recorder dubbing the Czech version of countless English videos.
My student went on to inform me that the most popular genre of movies was pornography. Because religion is not a large part of Czech life (the largest block of people in the nation, when broken down by religion, is no religion at all), there doesn't exist the conflicts between religious and social acceptances that plagues America and other nations. So the first large batch of western adult videos to be translated into Czech was translated by a sole male, sitting at his kitchen table. Imagine, for a moment, watching an adult video with only one, dull, monotonic voice doing all the dubbing... "yes." "do you like that?" "yes i do. that's great baby."
These days, that's a running joke here, and it's even been used to advertise for English lessons.
On a completely different note, I have to say that quaint is nice. European is nice. Old school is nice. But jebus, cobblestone is frickin' slippery when it has snow on it!
cau
posted by David at 1:45 PM
1 Comments:
I just visited Prague for the first time over the holidays. I can't believe that women can walk in high heels on snowy, icy, slippery cobblestones and not kill themselves. I had some difficulty wearing hiking boots.
Also, I was watching some czech TV channel and they were showing "Nash Bridges" dubbed by one voice as you describe. The even weirder thing was that you could hear the English behind it...
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