American movies in Japan

Mark H Nornes amnornes at umich.edu
Mon Jun 3 20:13:10 EDT 2002


This is probably the reason you'll hear most often for why Japanese
audiences prefer subtitles for their movies (except for tv, as Aaron
notes). However, Aaron also hints that there are conventions as play, and
I think he's absolutely correct. I've looked into the history of
subtitling a bit, and it is clear that a wide variety of reasons were at
play in the choice between subbing and dubbing at the transition to sound.
They include the relative power of American studios, economic
rationalization, size of the target (linguistic) market, government
regulation (and thus politics...fascist regimes prefered dubbing, for
example), and by extention the relationship to the other. There are others
as well.

You can find some of the fruits of this research, both historican and
theoretical, in my article "For an Abusive Subtitling," which was
published in Film Quarterly. I should add that subsequent research hints
that it's a bit more complicated than rendered here, something further
confirmed by a fascinating story Chika Kinoshita told me at SCS last week.
Anyway, the article is online at:

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1070/3_52/54731368/p1/article.jhtml

Best,

Markus




On Sun, 2 Jun 2002 Beeswax20 at cs.com wrote:

> So the reason why most movies are subbed isn't because the Japanese want to
> hear and appreciate it in its original form? I know I hate watching foreign
> films dubbed. It loses something in the transition. I figured the Japanese
> society felt the same way, thus watching subs.
>



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