I loved this film and its sequel growing up, but I always wondered:
1) Was it filmed in English, or did the dubbing just closely resemble what their Italian lips are doing?
2) Did Hill and Spencer do the English dubbing (their voices were so perfect for the roles!)?
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who were the actors who did the dubbing?
shareGene Luotto was responsible for directing the english voice dubbing in many of these movies, to varied results. The Trinity movies were brilliantly done. Robert Easton was the voice of Terence Hill in these movies. He appears as an on screen actor in Paint Your Wagon as a prospector and he is the touched in the head young bad guy doing the chicken/animal noises in Robert Duvalls group in True Grit. Easton used to appear on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson showing his vast knowledge of different regional dialects. He was a master of slightly different dialects of just about any region you could mention. They would test his knowledge. The fellow who did Bud's voice can be heard doing other actors english dubbed voices in many other Italian movies. I don't know his name offhand. But they were both spot on in the Trinity movies. You would never guess they were not the real voices of these actors. Bud's performance suffers in the english translations in his other movies from not having this same voice actor dubbing him.
In many cases, Gene Luotto's crew would re-write some of these movies slightly, again with varied results. It is impossible to tell how much they added to these movies. When Bud's back is to the screen and you hear "howdy Sherif" then Bud saying "Shut up!", that is all Luotto's crew adding those jokes. I think they work very well in a scene that just had Bud walking away down the street and nothing else.
I'm so glad the OP asked this, because I've wondered the same thing for years. Are you saying that Bud Spencer and Terence Hill were speaking English but they were dubbed anyway? I suppose both had a heavy accent that the director would want to hide to make them sound like they were really in the Old West.
So the growl I know as the growl of Bud Spencer is really someone else's growl. This explains why I haven't been able to watch "Troublemakers" all the way through. Bud Spencer sounds like a troll with a gonad problem in that.
Bud and Terence talk about dubbing in a 2006 interview:
There is a big controversy about the new generation of dubbing actors which is not on the same level as the preceding one. You instead have built your careers thanks to dubbing...
Bud: Not exactly. In the beginning yes, we were dubbed, but it is important to consider that all our movies were filmed in English, because they were sold to other countries in phase of production already.
Terence: At the time it was no problem, it was done and that's that. And we were both lucky to have two excellent dubbing actors, Pino Locchi for me and Glauco Onorato for Bud. It was similar to what happened with Clint Eastwood in the Sergio Leone films: Eastwood's voice was totally different from Enrico Maria Salerno's - who was one of the best Italian actors - so the way of interpretation was also very much different.
Full interview here:
http://www.terencehill.com/interview_hd_2007.html