Most ex-patriots living and working in Spain will be all too aware of the Spanish penchant for dubbing foreign-language films. Whether Spanish-speaking or not, this is enormously irritating, particularly for those of us not living in more cosmopolitan cities like Madrid or Barcelona, with more cinemas showing films in original version. The nearest big city to me is San Sebastián, which hosts an annual international film festival famed for its predilection for the avant-garde. Throughout the festival, all showings are in original version and San Sebastián is extremely proud of its cinematic culture. Yet after almost 60 years of hosting the event, there is still only one small, two-screen … [Read more...] about Spain’s film dubbing: ghost of a fascist past must be laid to rest
film dubbing
Quality TV is the big casualty of Spain’s dubbing
That Fox Television’s recent announcement it would be screening medic drama series House in the original English —with subtitles— was considered a news story by the Spanish media might go some way towards explaining this country’s poor ranking in EU tables of member populations’ knowledge of languages other than their own. More saliently, it highlights this country’s dismal record when it comes to producing quality television programming. Spain ranks as the fourth-worst country in the EU when it comes to mastering foreign languages, according to a recent report by Eurostat. Those figures coincide with a report by the EU’s Dubbing and Subtitling Needs and Practices in the European … [Read more...] about Quality TV is the big casualty of Spain’s dubbing