Sorry, I don’t really know how to phrase my question. For example, we know that over here in the USA, a box set of dragon ball z contains the English dub and the original Japanese track. If someone from somewhere else wanted to watch, let’s say SpongeBob on DVD, could they expect the original English track or was it commonplace to only have the local dub? ETA: Of course I’m referring to the time period before streaming, and I mean any type of popular cartoon.
Well in the 90s in Eater Europe we first had cable TV without subs or dub, just the original track (English, German, Italian, Spanish) so we had to learn the language just watching the shows trying to understand. Then subs started to be common and almost no dub. Then in late 2000s dubing started to be the norm for animations but movies are still subed and nobody likes dubed movies.
Bit late but I just remembered two interesting cases:
- some Japanese animes not intended for children but marketed to them in France ~30 years ago were sometimes not translated but dialogues were improvised to censor anything inappropriate
- in Switzerland they used to put subtitles in 3 languages resulting in a ridiculous proportion of the screen covered with text (maybe they still do idk)
Dubbed, never ran into an option to listen to the Japanese audio with subs
In Estonia like everything aimed at kids was dubbed to Estonian but very poorly, it was one of my motivators for learning English.
OP, are you ESL (like me)? I’m sorry, I’m not mocking you or anything but your thread title reminds me of Monty Python’s “People called Romanes, they go, the house.”
