Watching Russian TV in English

Television stations in Russia are perenially cash-strapped. When they buy films from English speaking networks they buy them in English and go for hot, current items like... Top Gun! (I kid you not).

Illiteracy is a problem in Russia and there are no real figures on what the extent of it is. This is still a society which doe snot encourage lifelong learning, where the education system encourages learning by rote rather than analytical thinking, where teachers scrape by with a salary of 7 roubles per teaching hour (with a 45 minute lesson) and where school is seen as a necessary evil to be gotten over with as fast as possible.

There are instances of teachers selling home-made vodka to students as a sideline to supplement their income and instances of teachers who have little experience or qualifications, being press-ganged to a class because there was no one else availabel to teach it.

The end result is that TV is dubbed. The quality of the dubbing depends on a number of factors, not least the quality of the equipment you have at your disposal. In the 21st century all films are created with a soundtrack and speech track that are added separately precisely so they can be separated and dubbed if necessary.

It doesn't work quite that way here. Now I am not sure how dubbing works here from a technical point of view because I am not a dubbing expert but I'd hazard a guess and say it is the TV equivalent of trying to dubb over the precise speech of actors and actresses as they speak without erasing the speech track.

Sometimes this amounts to little more than a vocal translation after they have spoken in English (yep! I can watch a Russian film on TV no prob). At other times it is overran with some interesting results because in order for the Russian translator to make themselves heard they have to shout loudly enough to drown out the English conversation which, however is still audible in the background and in the gaps in between the different speech patterns.

Ok, I know, you are reeling. So was I. Wait though, it gets better. Dubbing has a surreal effect. The cheapest ones get one guy (it is always a guy) who does all the parts (good guy, bad guy, girl, woman, and even translation of the written parts which appear on the screen like dates, places and so on) in the same monotonic, deadpan Russian voice. The better ones at least get at least two translators of different sexes to match the parts.

This means that tough-guy acts such as Arnold Schwarzenegger have thick, manly voices befitting their image. Tom Cruise, for example, sounds like some kind of giant-slaying, Siberian goliath.