james_nicoll

For some reason I never thought about whether non-Anglophone nations do their own version of TV theme songs for imported shows.

Probably depends on the shows, the countries, and it may depend on the era. For example from what I can tell most of the music, not just the theme, was changed for Albator, the French translation of the late '70s Leiji Matsumoto anime Space Pirate Captain Harlock. For some reason the German dub of Space: 1999, Mondbasis Alpha 1, used Jean Michel Jarre's "Oxygene 2" as the theme for most episodes.

Some people prefer their foreign TV and films to be subtitled. Some prefer them dubbed, or at least grudgingly accept them for children's shows and the like, because children can't, at young age, read rapidly enough to make use of the subtitles. In some countries it is much more common to dub even more mature fare. In Europe it seems the largest countries, by population, make more use of dubbing over English language. Except for the UK of course. (It would be amusing if they insisted on dubbing the shows with proper English, wouldn't it? Alas, they do not.)

People do really sometimes disagree quite vehemently whether a given show or a film should be dubbed. It doesn't work for TV shows, but films are sometimes distributed in two versions: one dubbed, so kids can watch, and other for people who want to hear the original sound track--voice acting, music, all the sounds. (Let me just add that I know who the people with the wrong opinions are on this issue very clearly!)

When shows are dubbed, it's usually more fitting to also make a version of the theme song in the same language at the same time. I suppose this isn't very surprising to anyone. It can lead to a bit of harmless fun when people try to reinterpret the translated theme song as another language, though. As happened here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm8WmiKj5go

It's only half as funny as it could be for most of yo though. I apologize in advance. At least it gives you ideas for Youtube searches if you want more of this sort of, well, harmless fun :)

There has been a upsurge in subtitled foreign TV shows on the BBC recently, mostly Scandinavian cop shows, and someone suggested that this was because reading the subtitles makes you have to concentrate so much more to follow the show.

So a TV critic last week decided as an experiment to watch a BBC crime show - Silent Witness - with the sound off and the subtitles for the deaf on. He said the result was the show seemed even slower than usual. He also couldn't see there being a discussion on Emilia Fox's blouses the way there is over Sofia Grabol's sweaters.

My spoken French is kind of limited, but from what I could make out the back-translation in the subtitles of the video is pretty accurate. So if you compare those to the original English lyrics, you can see what liberties they took.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_Kim_possible_theme_song_lyrics_in_french vs http://www.lyricsondemand.com/soundtracks/k/kimpossiblelyrics/callmebeepmethekimpossiblesonglyrics.html

Seems to be pretty different.