It sure was. Mom said she watched it when they visited the US years ago.
But, surprise, surprise, it was dubbed in Tamil.
Quite a surreal experience for me, to watch a classic Hitchcock movie, with my mother, and the movie's dialogs in Tamil. The blonde Melanie speaking Tamil was one for the ages.
It seemed like I was watching "Whose line is it anyway" where those funny guys mouth hilarious lines to random movie clips. Or, like when Drew Carey pretends to speak Chinese when all he does is talk mumbo-jumbo.
Now, that movie was in English but had English subtitles as well. After a a while, I realized that I had stopped listening to the awesome lines and was merely reading the subtitles.
Dubbing and subtitling can seriously affect the movie experience. But, there is one particular downside to dubbing: it takes away a wonderful opportunity for the non-native viewer to learn English.
A few years ago, the visiting Swedish students who stayed with us always impressed me with their command of the English language. They said that in addition to learning the language in school, they watched a whole lot of American movies and television shows. Even shows like Jerry Springer!
This was possible for them in Sweden only because the imports were (are?) not dubbed into Swedish, while most other European countries routinely dubbed the American shows into local languages.
Given such an opportunity to learn English, one would think that there would be no dubbing in India. After all, to begin with, there is a huge population that has more than a basic idea of the language.
Even more than that, wouldn't India stand to gain if people watched the shows without them being dubbed into Tamil or any other local language, when so much of India's economic growth is tied to global outsourcing where knowledge of English is a phenomenal competitive advantage?
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