Remember the days before streaming services were a thing? Yep, basically that: as in people would burrow a rented copy from a friend who paid money to obtain a official copy on DVD from blockbuster then ripping the contents into those blank DVDs (the white ones) meaning they’ve pirated a copy for home use but it’s still a “torrent”. I remember watching a ripped copy of Finding Nemo (or other kids movies from that era) when I was younger.
The same with “lending” a purchased copy from a store a friend has proceeding to rip the DVD content onto a blank DVD having a copy. Then there are CAM’s (pirates using a video camera to record the film upon being shown in theaters) usually they do this around the debut (new releases in cinema) by sneaking a camcorder but the footage is shit (I remember back in 2010, I’ve seen Alice in Wonderland via CAM and it sucked due to bad resolution and audio).
When I wanted to learn Polish, I obviously downloaded Star Wars in Polish because it should be fun. I had a shitty connection and it took me 4 days to download everything (like, oh it’s all the movies in uncompressed Full-HD grab your pop corn).
I discovered that they use lektors in Poland, people who speak in the most boring way on top of the English dialogues. You can hear the original audio in the background, which makes it worse. I deleted everything in less than 10 seconds.
My first experience with lektors (thanks for teaching me the name!) was years ago with a season of
M*A*S*HI got from P2P: one guy droning on in Russian over all the original actors’ voices. So I thought it was something exclusive to Russian pirate media! I mean, no one in their right mind with a legitimate licence to release media would put out something that shit , right??? 😆Fortunately those files came with a secondary audio track that did not have the boring Russian guy droning over the actors, so I didn’t have to suffer through it.
But then last November I tried to watch (legitimately, not pirately) a Russian film, the action movie Одиночное плавание (The Detached Mission) (1985) and got… a lektor speaking over the dialogue. I resisted the urge to commit murder for 10 minutes (I really tried to give it a chance) before I quit in absolute rage at the boring f%&king c%nt talking over everyone!!! 🤣
To add insult to injury, the lektor was talking in Russian over characters who were speaking in English, so I had to read the English subtitles just to understand what English-speaking characters were saying!
My experience detailed here: https://piefed.social/c/fullmoviesonyoutube/p/1514124/full-movie-odinochnoe-plavanie-the-detached-mission-1985
The fact that there are countries in the free world today that still perpetrate this crime against humanity makes me want to cry! Give me subtitles or give me dubbing: anything but a f&%king lektor! 😆
Damn, reading that article… Lektors are not everywhere in Eastern Europe. Hungary in particular prides itself in using very high quality dubbing, in so far as having talent agencies and academies for dubbing.
One of the biggest prides is The Flintstones, which was dubbed in the 60s during the height of socialism, where everything western was frowned upon. More about it here.