[Idea] fixing "wrong" dubbings

[spoRv]

First of all, thanks to Evit for his wonderful blog about Italian dubbings: it is a precious source of info, and very funny! So, my idea is originated by his own blog.

We, not-native-speakers who watch movies (series, documentaries etc) in another language, got them usually in one of these "flavours":
- dubbed (each actor with his/her voice, normal for the Italian market, and not only)
- voiceover (usually a single voice for any actor, like the dreadful "lektor" in Poland or Russia; we in Italy usually have this for docs or news)
- subtitles (mostly used on northern Europe and in many other countries, I guess)

Now, leaving out voiceover, we (read: this forum's member) could work to fix translations errors, I guess...

Subtitles should be simplers: just fix the soft subs (or replace a "bad" one with a "right" one, like we do with audio tracks)

More difficult would be to "fix" dubbing... it is not easy to extract perfectly a voice from an audio track, yet is not impossible... still, it is quite difficult to find out one that has a voice very similar to the original dubber... but, sometimes it would (could?) be preferable to have a slightly different voice that "tells the right thing", instead a perfect voice that tells something plainly wrong/out of place...

Dunno if such kind of work is feasible and worth the hassle, but, as a fan of good dubbing (in particular of the one made some time ago, when sometimes the dubber voices were great and so similar to the original, if not better), it will be nice to fix very few wrong things to get a "perfect" dubbing...

Opinions?

[Evit]

Thanks for the compliments on my blog, unfortunately for most of you, folks, it's only in Italian so you'll have to trust SpoRv's judgement on that
I imagine that your post is aimed to French, German, Spanish, Canadian and South American members and I don't know in these countries what needs to be "fixed" or even if it's "right" to fix anything from theatrical dubbings. The risk of inserting all-new mistakes is always around the corner.
What film in particular made you think of this idea? The only case of fans fixing a dubbing (that I know of) was done for the Italian version of "Star Wars Revisited" where someone used audio clips of the same dubbers from other films of that era to replace famous "mistakes", but the guy got lucky. It's incredibly hard to find such replacements and even harder to find someone who could imitate professional dubbers without having an abysmal gap in quality. Even modern professional dubbers can't match the type of acting from dubbings of the 70's and 80's, I doubt the average Joe from home ever could.
It's such a niche idea that I doubt it could go somewhere, but I like how you always come up with these crazy ideas... this time it sparked from reading my entertainment blog so I feel somewhat responsible, ahah!

[spoRv]

Yes, you were responsible this time, shame on you!

I thought about replacing the overacted scene on "The Thing" with maybe English track.

Star Wars: revisited track? Tell me more!!!

[Evit]

The Thing has a couple of mistakes, I'm sure you read those in my article, which ones is the overeacted scene? Going by memory, I don't think any of those mistakes can be easily fixed unless you redub whole lines. Tricky

You'll find an old interview about SW revisited in Italian in this interview here on my blog

[spoRv]

I mean when McReady "bombed" the Thing.

Thanks for the SW link!

[Evit]

Ah, yeah. If it's about removing small lines of dialogue that shouldn't be too hard, especially if you have an English track where nobody speaks

[spoRv]

Yep, I guess so!

[MrBrown]

As being from Germany, also a Land of dubbing, I would say it is not so easy, to fix a dubbing for different reasons:
First, consistency of the voices: it is quite irritating if you know a sub, and a company makes a new dub (maybe out of licensing issues), and suddenly all voices sounds different, and even have different type of voice acting, giving a movie a complete new tone. But it is even more irritating watching a movie with different voice actors for one character. There are few German DVD where this happens. And it really... Annoyes.

Second, the syncronity of text and image: I doubt it is not easy to dub a movie. The studio has to make adjustments in the translation to fit the length of dialogues and harmonize the text as good as possible. There are enough occasions where text and lip movement clearly is put of place... But even wring dubs seem to be well done, when they are at least synchronized to the lips as much as possible, and the content of the dub transfer the original meaning.

Deleting something like a shout, that just is not in the original audio may work. On the other hand: if it always was in the dub, people might just miss it, because they expect it...