Ich bin ein Mac. Und du?

#17: Steve, somewhere I read that John Wayne liked the german voice in the dubbed version even more than his own (or was that Robert De Niro?) ;-)
For us germans it is sometimes a little strange to hear voices out of movies in unexpected situations like the german voice of Bruce Willis in an advertisement of a do-it-yourself store. And to hear the same voices for different actors - like the one for John Wayne also dubbed actors like Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, Richard Widmark, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, George C. Scott, Yves Montand, Lino Ventura, Trevor Howard, Bud Spencer (> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Marquis ).

#21 Hi Pepe! Did you read the first sentences? Scandinavia "..is most commonly defined as the three kingdoms that historically shared the Scandinavian Peninsula, namely Norway, Sweden and Denmark".

From what I understand, Apple Sweden (at least, and possibly the rest of the Scandinavian/Noric countries) aren't even allowed to show the ads on TV here. Not least of which is because it's way too expensive in comparison to the miniscule budget Apple provides their northern-european counterparts with, but also because most of the "Get a Mac" (and even the Switch ads before that) contain some unsubstantiated claims (however non-specific and well-meaning).

Pretty strict competition-laws here. A couple of years ago McDonald's Sweden and Burger King Sweden struck a deal. They'd hold a joint taste test on Sweden's three largest town squares, on tables placed exactly half-way between a McDonald's and a Burger King restaurant. Passer-by's were the judges.

Whoever won, got to, rightfully, claim in Swedish media that "[brand] tastes better". Burger King won, and have until recent years, been running the campaign "Grillat är godast" ("Grilled tastes best").

Let's see Apple & Microsoft do something like that.

The spanish versions are terrible, IMO. Why do the Spanish have this unnatural accent that only surfaces when they get stuff dubbed into spanish... which is most of the time?? Everytime i come across a spanish-dubbed movie, no matter how good it is, i'd rather not see it! Even with spanish being my native language. I hate dubbed versions of anything as a general rule anyway, but the Spanish just have a knack to make it unbearable. (anyway, no offense to spanish people!)

We Swedes speak are supposed to speak a lot of languages! Just look at the Swedish Apple Store page for the Mac Pro: it's mostly in Spanish!

Also the Italian ones: http://www.apple.com/it/getamac/. We've got some of the best voice acting this side of the Western emisphere :)

Italian can be found here:

http://www.apple.com/it/getamac/ads/

my god, terrible dubbing (though the Mac's voice actor also does the dubbing for Ben Stiller)

I like the Japanese ones though, they are just ridiculously bad, really like that.

In the Netherlands people prefer subtitles to dubbing, and commercials on TV or print are usually not localized at all.
I think nowadays you get some introduction to English in school when10 or 11 years old.
We also have a lot of English words like "download" or "internet" for that matter.
I don't think that using English words is ugly at all though, it's very common for "new" words not to be translated, isn't it? Like "restaurant" (french) or "money" (french from monnaie)?

Hmmm. Very interesting, Anders. I know, this has about as much to do with Apple as some other stuff covered here but I checked out what Wikipedia writers have to say and does and does not share your opinion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavia