American movies in Japan

[Mark Nornes]

On Tuesday, June 4, 2002, at 06:49  PM, drainer at mpinet.net wrote:
>   The general consensus is that something is lost in dubbing, which is 
> true.

And it is also true that there are important "losses" in subtitling. 
Even if you have the original soundtrack intact with a subbed film 
(dubbing usually retains the music and sound effects tracks), you can't 
get around the fact that it's still a translation. We must be careful 
about obsessing about loss to the exclusion of gains and new pleasures 
in the translation. I've been flying in the face of nature----my 
conventionalized preference for subtitled foreign films---and have been 
choosing the English soundtracks on DVDs recently. I'm no longer 
completely confident that subtitling is _naturally_ better than dubbing!

Michael also asked about the translation of silent films. This is 
something I want to research in depth next year. Hearsay suggests that 
the benshi eliminated the need for translating new intertitles. Does 
anyone know this for a fact? Even high-prestige blockbusters by the 
majors were shown this way? Assuming no one on this list was around 
those days, perhaps someone has come across hints in the journals?

Markus