Seikilos Blog

One of the main movie distributors in Argentina decided to stop using subtitles in favour of dubbing. Their movies are mainly teenage-oriented, and the company alleges that young people in Argentina are no longer able to read or follow them. Despite the outrageous education failure that prevents those people to cope with short text sentences parading in the lower section of the screen, the very idea of dubbing is dreadful. Once I learned that in most non-English speaking countries dubbing is preferred to subtitles, I knew that subtitling in Argentina would have a limited life. Perhaps objections like that of Borges stopped the invasion back in their beginnings:

The art of combination is not infinite in its possibilities, though those possibilities are apt to be frightening. The Greeks engendered the chimera, a monster with the head of a lion, the head of a dragon, and the head of a goat; the second-century theologians, the Trinity, in which the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are inextricably linked; the Chinese zoologists, the ti-yiang, a bright red, supernatural bird equipped with six feet and six wings but with neither face nor eyes; nineteenth-century geometrists, the hypercube, a four-dimensional figure enclosing an infinite number of cubes and bounded by eight cubes and twenty-four squares. Hollywood has just enriched this frivolous museum of teratol