Wait.....

yeah... speaking of languages


and in the German speaking area it is "constantine" film who made the DVD - so it's purely in German - same goes for "the house of spirits" and other Bernd Eichinger products. Only the parfume has various languages... It seems though that the German actors did all their lines in both languages - Vogel and Adorf for example.

I am so disappointed in these DVDs :( I had to download the English versions

To be a bit more precise, there is a tendency in the non-English-speaking part of the world to produce their films in English because of a tendency in the English speaking part of the world, primarily in the US, to reject movies with a dubbed soundtrack.

Ironically, the actors don't all speak impeccable English and so they do get dubbed by native speakers of English anyway, but at least in this way they can easily be exactly synchronous. Since there is a much greater tolerance for flaws in the dubbed dialogue in German speaking audiences, it is possible to have the very actors that spoke bad English originally dub themselves in good German. (Similar things would apply to Danish, I am sure.)

But then Hollywood will routinely remake any popular movies for US audiences anyway, with local actors.

Subtitles, I think, are considered an inferior option by all audiences, so they wouldn't help with the acceptance of a movie at all.

Incidentally, there is a discussion on the web somewhere about differences between the Danish original of "Smilla" and the English translation (by a US American) compared to, for instance, the German translation, which follows the original much more closely. An argument was given for a translation to also transform a story into a cultural context that the target audience would be more familiar with. Which, of course, would deprive the readers of the English version of "Smilla" of a whole lot of atmosphere, arguing that it would go right over their heads, anyway. Well, thanks, but no thanks.

I found Byrne's Irish accent somewhat intrusive.