No comprendo

Originally posted to MySpace, April 20, 2009

 

Since the advent of the DVD, seemingly endless possibilities have been added to the simple experience of watching pre-recorded movies or TV shows. You get interviews with actors and directors, fascinating behind-the-scenes footage, deleted scenes, bloopers, and the list goes on.

One nice feature I have always enjoyed with my collection of DVD's bought in Germany is the language options. The discs generally offer some combination of major European languages: German, English, Spanish, French, and/or Italian. After having had to digest so much American TV dubbed into German, I preferred to watch movies on DVD with the language set to English. Now that I am again immersed in my native tongue, watching more DVD's in German could help me maintain my language skills. In the United States, it wouldn't hurt to work on some Spanish, too. Thankfully, I can easily do so by popping in a few episodes of Star Trek or Stargate with the appropriate audio setting—with or without subtitles.

I recently noticed that few—if any—American DVD's provide viewers with options for different languages. Why is that? Is the best they can do really a choice between "Dolby 5.1 Surround" vs. "Dolby 2.0"?

Do manufacturers consider it a waste of time and money to record DVD's sold in the U.S. with audio tracks in more than one language? Sure, most Americans know only English, but with the growing Hispanic population—especially in the Southwest—it would seem to make good business sense to have your product appeal to Spanish speakers. Could it be they are purposely denying that community—many of whom are undocumented immigrants—access to Hollywood entertainment in their own language so they are forced to learn English? To the distributors, it might be "bad enough" that TV offers a considerable amount of programming in Spanish already.

Frankly, it wouldn't hurt most Americans one bit to accidentally select "Spanish" when they sit down to watch a flick at home. They might just pick up a few words before they can switch the language back to English. Perhaps we could turn the U.S. into a nation of polyglots by locking DVD's onto a language other than English for at least one quarter of the movie.