Voice actors on Hungarian dubbing: Attitudes and experiences

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
In Hungarian cinemas, television and streaming channels, most products still get Hungarian dubbing/narration. For many people, it is the only accessible way of understanding these products, furthermore, it could serve as great help in Hungarian language maintenance in minority circumstances and/or learning the language as a heritage or a foreign one. However, many consumers, just like representatives of the profession themselves, witness a decline in quality of dubbing.
Therefore, a comprehensive research has been launched by the author in cooperation with the trade union of Hungarian dubbing that aims to explore the linguistic aspects of the problem, more precisely, the attitudes regarding different linguistic phenomena in Hungarian dubbing. The paper presents the results of the first phase in which voice actors were asked by a self-designed questionnaire. 69 voice actors participated in the study that means a representative 10% of this profession in Hungary.The findings reveal that although they consider themselves responsible for the quality, they face many problems of the texts to be read out, while they are not always allowed to correct them, not even the obvious ones. The paper provides a brief explanation of it by presenting everyday experiences and difficulties of the participants, and outlines the further phases of the research. The final results and the dissemination of them can help develop the quality assurance system of Hungarian dubbing that serves the interest of many millions of consumers in the end.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Andrea Parapatics is associate professor at the Institute of Hungarian and Applied Linguistics at the University of Pannonia in Veszprém, Hungary. She is an associate editor of Hungarian Cultural Studies, Hungarian Journal of Applied Linguistics, founding member and editor of Anyanyelv-pedagógia journal, and she founded the Veszprém group of the Hungarian Linguistic Society. Besides dozens of articles, she published a monograph, a monolingual dictionary and two exercise books. Her research area is the study of language attitudes towards regional dialects and slang, and she has started a research on the attitudes towards Hungarian dubbing in cooperation with representatives of the profession.