Netflix has changed the game for dubbed movies. They now do it so well it's hard to tell it's dubbed. Used to be so obvious and plodding. Now very natural.
I remember in my yoof, people said the reason Italians were so bad at English was that all the Hollywood movies they watched had been dubbed while the Germans watched them in the original with subtitles and so kind of imbued English by osmosis. And certainly it's true, or was when I lived in Europe, that Germans generally speak better English than the Italians. But I'm sure it's not a univariate thing. Btw I speak here as one who taught English as a foreign language to Italians and to Germans in the 1970s. (Linguarama).
I've always Unliked dubbed movies. But that was when they were done badly. The article here explains how Netflix has led the charge to doing dubbing much better. It's true. I remember watching the Spanish movie Money Heist last year, in English, not realising at first that its mother tongue was Spanish. That's how good the dubbing was. After a bit I changed to watching it in Spanish with English subtitles and that worked best for me.
Recently we've watched a couple of great Italian series on Netflix — The Trial and Carlo and Malik. We watched both in Italian with English subtitles. It's great for my wonky Italian. Now we're watching Call My Agent in French with English subs.
This is a new pleasure. To watch foreign movies with very well done subtitles. And to have the option to choose the dubbed into English version if you want.
By the way, here in Hong Kong foreign movies are always subtitled not dubbed and English-speaking levels among Chinese speakers has been pretty good. It's also good for my Chinese reading to read the Chinese subs. Sometimes very fast they are.
The article is below. Today's South China Morning Post.
https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/entertainment/article/3128576/voice-actors-demand-netflix-series-lupin-and-money-heist
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