----------------------------Original message---------------------------- having entered this discussion rather recently, i will keep this brief in case i'm covering territory already discussed. i just want to note my apprehension concening the use of sub-titling as opposed to dubbing. i recently saw a very interesting paper presented on just this topic. the author, a graduate student at NYU, grew up in Germany and presented a case not just in favor of dubbing, but in an argument similar to the one presented here on the behalf of sub-titling, she urged better dubbing. she said that in Germany as a child, she had always assumed that the german voices she heard when John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart spoke were their real voices and she was actually disappointed to eventually hear their "actual" voices. the actors in her country work hard and are serious and profressional about their job of translating a Hollywood film into the German language. the actors that are the voices of one big-name actor are that actor's voice in other films as well. getting of the occasional discontinuity between lip movement and words spoken is much simpler a task than trying to take in mise-en-scene, action, inflection, etc while reading small yellow or white print on the bottom of a screen. it was indicated in this thread that one goal of foreign films should be to increase their popularity in the US. to that end, i find it difficult to believe that sub-titling could ever hold the appeal of dubbing unless by popularity you are going for the sweater-vest and tweed crowd. serious, consistent and professional dubbing, while it may to an extent "Americanize" the film, is really the only realistic way that large audiences are going to embrace "foreign language" films. look at the relative success British, Australian and even New Zealand films enjoy here as opposed to German, French, Italian, etc. A British film is no more/no less foreign than a French film, it is simply in a less-foreign language. i hope this argument is not construed as an elitist snubbing of what general audiences are capable of, but rather as an observation of what movie-goers seem to desire when spending their $8 on an evening out. if foreign films are to seek a truly wider audience, they should not be sold, as has been contended in this thread, on their novelty as foreign creations but on their internal appeal as entertaining and interesting films. for this to work, they must also be as fully accessible to the audience as they are in any other country. i don't mean to cover old ground, but i was concerned by the suggestion that some type of consensus favoring sub-titling had been reached. shawn [log in to unmask]