Voice actors in focus: language attitudes and practice in Hungarian dubbing

Abstract

In the present article, Hungarian voice actors’ language attitudes and experiences are studied with relation to the texts to be read out while dubbing and narrating foreign language audiovisual products. The study was conducted with the great moral and practical support of the trade union of Hungarian voice actors and its two popular and famous members as the representatives of this profession have never been asked and studied from a sociolinguistic viewpoint before. With their help, 10% of the profession participated in the study, filling out a commonly designed online questionnaire. Since most of the foreign language audiovisual products that are released in Hungarian cinemas, television and online streaming channels still get Hungarian dubbing or narration, while its language quality is decreasing, it is worth investigating the process behind the final products. The study points out many problems of the texts’ linguistic quality and presents the attitudes of those who have to give their voice to these, and might have a chance to correct them, or might not. The paper presents the first phase of an overall research that aims to explore the case of Hungarian dubbing from a sociolinguistic viewpoint. In the future, audiovisual translators’ and consumers’ – inland, transborder, and emigrant Hungarians’ – attitudes will be studied to cover a wide range of stakeholders of the question.