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Dubbing should be banned

17 October 2001

I watched the movie Billy Elliot tonight even though it was dubbed. I'd seen it before and I'd told my friends that I would refuse to watch it if it weren't in English, but they dragged me in anyway. It was a university sponsored film and the ticket person seemed surprised when I asked if it was in English. We saw a few "previews" for movies that they're playing later this semester, so I saw dubbed trailers for Gladiator, Miss Congeniality (which is called Miss Undercover in German) and Meet the Parents (the German title translates to "My Bride, Her Father, and Me"). Yech with the wrong voices everywhere. It was not fun to watch Billy Elliot in German. Some of the songs were changed and the voices were terrible. All of the cool regional English accents were lost. I guess Germans are used to dubbing, but I've probably haven't seen more than five dubbed films in my whole life. I can only remember one. It would be difficult for me to read subtitles in German for a film which isn't in English, but I would rather hear the real voices and not understand.

I've also recently heard more English which is badly abused in German. In German, the past participle is very often marked with a "ge", so the verb for "make" ("machen") has the past participle "gemacht". Verbs also sometimes have separable parts and then the "ge" goes in between the separable part and the base verb in the past participle, so the verb for "make open" ("aufmachen") has the past participle "aufgemacht". These separable parts are often prepositions or other short words. At the computer info thing I went to last night, the guy behind me was talking to his neighbor about how he updated something or other on his computer. In treating the helpless, innocent English verb "update" like a German verb and then deciding that the "up" is somehow separable, he said "upgedated". My ears about started bleeding. Maybe I heard wrong and he only said "geupdated", which isn't quite as painful, but I'm pretty sure I heard "upgedated", which, by the way, is not in my German-German dictionary. People also say "gekidnappt", which is in the dictionary. The fake English in German is also funny, where English words are used in German in senses which don't exist in English, like the word for cell phone here is "Handy", and many Germans think that Handy is the English word for it. I guess we do the same thing in English, but we don't have nearly as many recent borrowings from German as the Germans do from English.

I need to write more because I'm losing my English skills here. I say things in English and can't remember simple words or put the verbs in wrong place (German word order is screwy). I went to my French class and it's only covering grammar I've already learned. I tell people I only took French for a year, but it was an intensive course with four semesters worth of stuff, but they don't seem to believe me. I went into a third semester course here and it was similar (I assume) to a third semester course at home. She wrote a list of what they were going to study and I wasn't sure at first if it was some kind of review list because it was a) really short and b) surprising that they hadn't learned some of it already. Some of it made sense for the third semester, but, for example, they're going to learn the simple future at the end of the semester. The simple future in French is one of the easiest tenses to form, in my opinion. I'm in a awkward position because I know almost all the grammar and don't want to (pay to - 100 DM, honestly not that much) sit through it again, but my vocabulary and conversational skills are well below par for the grammar level. I had to take a placement test, which also wasn't much fun because their idea of placement test here is very strange, the equivalent of filling in the blanks in a sentence like "John wants to buy a book, so he i__ go_____ to g___ t__ the bookst___ tom_______." I'm more used to getting a list of verbs with sentences like "If John wanted to buy a book, he ______ _____ to the bookstore tomorrow." I also haven't spoken or read much about French since May and what with all the German, French was pushed onto the back burner and lots was forgotten. I skimmed a short French grammar (in German) yesterday, but that didn't help my vocabulary much. I talked to the teacher, who seemed to think it was crazy for someone who'd only had a year to go into a higher level than the class I was in, but I'll see how the placement test turned out. I'm going to help a French friend with American English, so if nothing works out, I can at least to have a conversation now and then in French.

I'm going on a trip to Weimar on Sunday, which should be fun. I'm not sure how long the bus ride is there. At least four hours, I think. We're leaving at 6:30 in the morning. :)

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