Tuesday 18 October 2011

Whose Voice is it Anyway?

I think that most English speakers find dubbed versions of films and TV quite amusing to watch, and I often wonder if the full character can come across, like the southern gun specialist in CSI:Miami would it be better to give her a strong local dialect in dubbing rather than Hochdeutsch?  Something I that hadn't occurred to me was brought to my attention a few days ago.

I turned on the telly and a film was playing, the well known main actor was dubbed, Uwe had his back to the telly doing something on the computer.  The actor spoke and Uwe immediately said "Oooh Bill Murray!" I of course asked him if he had seen the film before, which he hadn't so I asked him how he knew who it was before looking, by his voice of course.  Now I am sure this is obvious to everyone else but I really hadn't thought that an actor would be dubbed by the same voice over artist for everything they do.  It reminded me of a story I heard a year or so ago about the death of Princess Diana, something crazy like 3000 look-alikes woke up to find themselves without a job.  I suppose it's not a case of "oh thank god Bill's got a new film contract, I can eat this year!" but they must do other acting jobs and put on other voices for different actor's.

Anyway here is a clip of Ghostbusters dubbed in German for your enjoyment!




2 comments:

  1. My favourite voice is the that of Inspector Barnaby in Midsomer Murders (which they just call Inspector Barnaby here), it's perfect - although I'm pretty sure John Nettles doesn't have his very own German voiceover artist ;)

    ReplyDelete
  2. <3 Midsomer Murders, I mean what's not to love? A Murder rate about 15 times higher than New York (at least) almost always due to reasons dating back at least 400 years and sometimes by an odd man with a very large wooden spoon. I must find out when it's on just to check out the voice :)

    ReplyDelete