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This stuff is fun: Commercial Opportunities in Iraq Oil Sector: https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1973BAGHDA00111_b.html https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/

• jmcgough 14y ago
  "The original series, which ran from 1971 to 1977, was so popular in Romania it was broadcast there twice a week. When ``Columbo`` stopped production in the U.S., suspicious Romanians thought their government had canceled the show because of import quotas. Fearing riots, the Romanian government begged the U.S. State Department to have the show`s star, Peter Falk, make a public-service announcement explaining the real reason for the demise of ``Columbo.`` Falk obliged and taped a TV spot, which he read phonetically in Romanian." http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1989-04-02/features/8903310956_1_peter-falk-bodyguards-gideon-oliver http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1989-04-02/features/89033...
  • starik36 14y ago
    That's hilarious. Columbo was my grandfather's favorite show on Hungarian TV back in the day. Every episode was absolutely perfectly lip synced - you couldn't even tell that Hungarian wasn't the original language.
    • roel_v 14y ago
      "Every episode was absolutely perfectly lip synced - you couldn't even tell that Hungarian wasn't the original language." OT, but do you know anything about how that worked? Surely in another language, the form of the lips while speaking is different, not to mention the length of sentences, double entendres that are impossible to translate, etc?
      • Samuel_Michon 14y ago
        Using ADR and creative translation teams. To fit the words with lip movements, dialogue could be quite different from the original while retaining the overall plot. “In Hungary, practically all television programmes are dubbed, as are about 50 percent of movies in theaters. In the socialist era, every one of them was dubbed with professional and mostly popular actors. Great care was taken to make sure the same voice actor would lend his voice to the same actor. In the early 1990s, as cinemas tried to keep up with showing newly released films, subtitling became dominant in cinema. This, in turn, forced TV channels to make their own cheap versions of dubbed soundtracks for the movies they presented, resulting in a constant degrading of dubbing quality. Once this became customary, cinema distributors resumed the habit of dubbing for popular productions, presenting them in a quality varying from very poor to average. However, every single feature is presented with the original soundtrack in at least one cinema in large towns and cities.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbing_(filmmaking)#Countries_that_generally_dub_foreign_programming_into_their_own_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbing_(filmmaking)#Countries_...
      • EdiX 14y ago
        > but do you know anything about how that worked? Surely in another language, the form of the lips while speaking is different It will be different but unless you read lips or pay close attention you won't notice it (too much). IIRC dub translators try to match end vowels of sentences. > not to mention the length of sentences A good adaptation will account for that and translate for matching durations. > double entendres that are impossible to translate That's not a problem unique to dubbing. When a joke is impossible to translate it isn't. Good translators will compensate for dropped jokes by adding other jokes when possible. Translated comedy is rarely good.