Femmes au foyer désespérée

My German is not the best. I will give you that. Actually my German is quite bad. It will give you that too. But my English is quite good. That, you have to hand me. Actually my fellow Danes and Scandinavians are quite good at English in general, but why? I think the answer is to be found in our television preferences. Dubbed TV-series and films are not really a thing in Denmark. You can bump into it when watching children’s television, but otherwise everything is in its original language with subtitles and we like it that way.

My first encounter with dubbed television was at an exchange program in France when I was 13 years old. Living with a French family was not the easiest as they didn’t speak English so when the son of the family asked me if I wanted to watch Desperate Housewives with him, I was thrilled and relieved (no more awkward silence, I hoped). To my surprise it was not thrilling or reliving at all, because in the moment one of my favorite characters started speaking, weird things came out of her mouth. I went to my room and called my mom to share this weird experience about redheaded Bree Van de Kamp suddenly speaking French instead of American in her genuine and polite tone of voice. Being quite traumatized, I did not watch Desperate Housewives for a very long time.

In my opinion, dubbing TV-series and films is a crime. A blasphemous crime. As audience you miss out on great actors doing incredible and admirable work. You miss out on knowing their voices and their way of speaking. I cannot even imagine watching House of Cards without Kevin Spacey’s accent, tone of voice, rhythm and pronunciation. It is such a shame to miss out on that. In my world there is no way it could ever be the same and is a pity to destroy such great works of art.

The other day I was looking at films being displayed in German cinemas and to my surprise, most of the films were shown in a dubbed version. Actually, it was quite hard to find most films in their original language. I did find a Danish film called Journal 64 and even though I already watched it back home in Denmark, I thought it would be fun to watch it here in Germany. My mind changed quickly when I saw the trailer. One of my favorite Danish actors’ voice had been turned into something unrecognizable and horrible and I realized that the German audience would never get to experience his amazing voice. Then I felt sorry for the Germans who are missing out on the full experience of all these great actors around the world.

Apart from missing out on some great artistic work, researchers found a correlation between your exposure for dubbed content and your English qualifications. People watching dubbed content in countries like Germany, Spain and Italy score an average of 23 percentage points lower when testing their English qualifications. Therefore the researchers’ suggestion simply is to stop the broadcasting of dubbed content (https://forskning.no/film/nordmenn-er-bedre-i-engelsk-fordi-filmer-ikke-dubbes/1282826).

So can we please all agree that dubbed TV-series and films are soon going to belong to the past? Not only do people miss out on the full experience of watching a filmic masterpiece with some of the world’s greatest actors, but they are possibly also short of language qualifications making them capable of being connected to the rest of the world. To me, dubbed content should already be water under the bridge.