Movies in Russian movie theatres are always dubbed. We are used to coming to cinema and just watching the movie we have been waiting for so long. Here, in Finland the situation is opposite. Nearly all the films that are shown both in movie theatres or on TV go with subtitles, only cartoons for children are dubbed. It surprised me, so I asked my tutors why films in Finland aren't dubbed.
The answer was simple. There are not a lot of people in the country, 5 millions (my city has the same number of people, can you imagine?), and the dubbing process takes a lot of time and demands a lot of work - translation, finding actors with similar voices, making lines, record them and so on. Moreover, Finnish words can be too long to fit the mouth movements. So, Finns found the solution and just make subtitles for every movie.
These decision can be both good and not so good for the spectator. From one side, watching films in its original form allows you to improve your English skills, because you hear English phrases and see what the phrase in your language is, and to enjoy the beauty of original voices of Hollywood actors. But, from the other hand, you should distract your attention constantly from what is going on on the screen to read the speeches, so you can miss something important.
I'm not sure I would be glad to adopt such a feature of Finnish film distribution. Our sound engineers make a great job searching for people who have similar voices, and they do it really well, all the voices sound very alike. Moreover, our great translators adopt some jokes and phrases to local realities so we don't miss the sense. Furthermore, after watching some films in Russian dub and then the original in English, I found out how much intonation means while you watching the movie. For example, Russian language is more expressive than English, so in some occasions hear how calm the main hero while he should be a bit angry, for instance, is quite strange. The dubbing helps avoiding it.
So, anyway, now I understand why in Finland there is no dubbing for films and I see the reason, but I'm happy that in my country we dub movies.