<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><html>On May 12, 2008, at 11:21 AM, Aaron Gerow wrote:</html><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; ">Two articles from Japan Today, one on problems of subtitling ......<br><a href="http://www.japantoday.com/category/kuchikomi/view/what-are-nazis-todays-kids-cant-handle-movie-subtitles">http://www.japantoday.com/category/kuchikomi/view/what-are-nazis-todays-kids-cant-handle-movie-subtitles</a></span></blockquote></div><br><div>This history is rather sketchy. The first subtitles were indeed, Morocco. But the reason for becomming a subtitling country was a little more complex. Warners introduced dubbing a bit after the first subtitled films, and made this a big part of their advertising. They even took out ads in the magazines teasing people a few months beforehand. But the dubbing job was produced by a Nikkei USC professor�in other words, by whoever they could find in LA. And he used local "talent," all of whom were from Hiroshima. Critics and audiences couldn't handle Hollywood actors speaking in Hiroshima-ben, so the experiment failed. This is the conventional telling of the story, and I haven't seen anything that suggests that's not accurate. </div><div><br></div><div>I haven't heard about the pressure to dumb down subtitles more than their current junior high school Japanese level. But I can't say I'm surprised. Dubbing and subtitling is the domain of distributors and producers, and so they want to cast the widest of nets. They'll winnow out as many kanji, slow down the timing, and generally tweak their translations to accommodate the broadest audience (ie., most mass of markets) possible. </div><div><br></div><div>Frankly, if they are dumbing down the subtitles further, I'd take the dubbed version any day. This is speaking as someone who has worked hard at loving dubbing (you can see my struggle, and learn a lot more about the history of subtitling and dubbing in Japan, in the book I just put out, <i>Cinema Babel</i>). </div><div><br></div><div>Markus</div></body></html>