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February 20, 2020 4:28 PM   Subscribe

The debate over subtitles, explained
In January, Parasite director Bong Joon-ho planted his flag in the subtitle camp, stating during his Golden Globes acceptance speech (for Best Foreign Language Film) that “once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” After Parasite’s Oscar win, it seemed that fans of foreign films had punched a sizable hole through that wall.
posted by the man of twists and turns (94 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
Kevin Drum can pound sand.
posted by Fizz at 4:37 PM on February 20, 2020 [4 favorites]


Subs > dubs.
posted by Fizz at 4:37 PM on February 20, 2020 [50 favorites]


I watch a lot of subtitled media, but I don't think a blanket "subs > dubs" is a reasonable position. At the very least, I really wish Netflix would let you filter media based on whether it's only got subtitles. The simple reality is that people watch TV and movies for different reasons (and the same person can differ based on time/circumstance). The fact that I can't filter out stuff with subtitles means that if I'm looking for something to watch at night while going to bed (which I will likely fall asleep during), Netflix is nearly useless, so I end up going with other sources.
posted by tocts at 4:42 PM on February 20, 2020 [9 favorites]


I like to watch a foreign language film on first viewing in a dubbed version. I want to appreciate the full visual affect. Film, after all, is a visual medium (unlike the theater, which is an acting medium). If I like the film well enough, I'll watch the subtitled version on second or third viewing.

This bias was confirmed for me when I watched "Spirited Away" the first time in a subtitled version. Naturally, I thought it was a great movie. But when I later watched the dubbed version, it seemed to have a whole different pace, much quicker. At the same time, it seemed more dense with detail - things I'd never noticed on first viewing. It went from being a great film, to an overwhelming artistic experience.

Reading a film-viewing are two different processes. They should be kept as separate as possible.
posted by Modest House at 4:43 PM on February 20, 2020 [5 favorites]


I find dubbing far more distracting and immersion-breaking than subtitles. I don't even mind subtitles – honestly, I hardly think twice about them. It's just part of watching movies.

(Heck, even predominantly English-language movies often have subtitles for lines spoken in other languages.)
posted by escape from the potato planet at 4:43 PM on February 20, 2020 [28 favorites]


I watch a lot of subtitled films and as long as it's a good story, I usually forget that I'm even reading them after a few minutes. If nothing else, if I'm watching at home it forces me to just watch the TV and not read Metafilter or the twitters while I'm watching the movie.
posted by octothorpe at 4:44 PM on February 20, 2020 [18 favorites]


For home viewing, I'd like the movie screen to be as intended, and a second monitor be running the subtitles, like at the opera. But I could choose the font, contrast, brightness, and positioning of the subtitle screen.
posted by StickyCarpet at 4:45 PM on February 20, 2020 [8 favorites]


For me, subs will always be better than dubs. I love hearing the different languages, even when they are fake or invented (eg Klingon). Also, my hearing isn't always great and I'll use subs even for films or TV in English.

But for my visually impaired friend, subs don't work at all. She has enough sight to watch tv, but not for subtitles, and she has to have someone read them to her.

Fortunately, we live in a world where we can subs for those who love them and dubs for those who don't.
posted by jb at 4:47 PM on February 20, 2020 [26 favorites]


Man, am I the only person without impaired hearing who watches everything with subtitles on, including English movies and TV? I wish all movies in theaters came with captions. I was a subs > dubs believer before I even tried watching stuff in other languages.
posted by bowtiesarecool at 4:48 PM on February 20, 2020 [64 favorites]


No you're not, bowtiesarecool. I find that dramas have been getting extremely whispery lately, and it's been going on for several years, so I don't think I can blame it on my age. So I leave the subtitles on.
posted by Countess Elena at 4:51 PM on February 20, 2020 [17 favorites]


It's not an either/or for me either. If I'm watching something animated with my kids, dubs are the only viable option. I watch tv with subtitles on the majority of the time, even if it's in English, my native language. If it's live-action, I just can't with dubs, it's too distracting.

When I binged Evangelion on Netflix, I tried dubs + subs, since it had to be quiet (watching after the kids were in bed) and THE TRANSLATION WAS DIFFERENT, so I switched to subs + the original Japanese language audio track because I knew then I wouldn't miss anything that was said.
posted by sleeping bear at 4:52 PM on February 20, 2020 [4 favorites]


I turn on subtitles for English language movies/tv that have a bad sound mix or if the actors have heavy accents.
posted by octothorpe at 4:52 PM on February 20, 2020 [5 favorites]


My mother was substantially disabled due to illness during the last decade of her life. Movies were one of the few things she could enjoy right up through the end, but subtitles were impossible for her for several different health reasons. There were many movies I wish she could have seen but no dubbed versions were available.

Now, I think subtitles are almost always better than dubbed versions in terms of expressiveness and accuracy, but it is super ableist and dumb to do all that "oh only an unlettered barbarian would like dubbed versions" stuff that people tend to do.
posted by Frowner at 4:53 PM on February 20, 2020 [27 favorites]


One thing I've noticed is that while Netflix's recommendation algorithm is really smart ("You enjoyed a few Indonesian horror films in a row. Here are some more!") Amazon's is pretty stupid. ("We have noticed you like the genre FOREIGN FILMS. Perhaps you'd like to follow up that J-Horror flick with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg?") Amazon also makes pretty enduring assumptions about you based on a handful of choices. Stream Bajrangi Bhaijaan and Prime will spend the next two years convinced you're a nice Desi person who needs a steady stream of Bollywood recs. (That part actually ended up okay. But still.)
posted by DirtyOldTown at 4:57 PM on February 20, 2020 [13 favorites]


Man, am I the only person without impaired hearing who watches everything with subtitles on, including English movies and TV?

No, not at all. I started doing this because my partner does have impaired hearing, but now I genuinely prefer it and get kind of annoyed when a piece of media doesn't have subtitles (or deploys subtitles inconsistently or illegibly, what's good video games?).

OTOH, there's definitely been an across-the-board improvement in the quality of film and TV dubs. We left the "give the janitor a microphone and a script and have him record in the coat closet" era a long time ago.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:01 PM on February 20, 2020 [7 favorites]


I tend to prefer dubs, but it's a soft preference - I wouldn't dream of watching Parasite dubbed, but I like my Ghibli dubbed. Animes I'll go back and forth on - I've seen enough instances where the subs are a direct translation and the dub is more polished and localised, and I think sometimes the acting on a dub is superior to the original (like with Cowboy Bebop) or the dub is the star of the show (the infamous Ghost Stories, a bad anime whose official translation is a gag dub). Just as often, the dub is the usual cast of mediocre voice actors, and the sub is thoughtfully done and a better all round experience.
posted by Merus at 5:08 PM on February 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


I think most native English speakers will never understand how everything is subtitled when you live in a non-english country. Sure, there are dubs but there's almost always the chance to watch subtitled screenings unless it's a movie for kids.

Dubbing everything to English and making it look like it's the "best" choice feels like it's just one more way for America to make everything contort to its own preferences.
posted by simmering octagon at 5:09 PM on February 20, 2020 [19 favorites]


Oddly, it's animation (where subs/dubs is particularly fraught online) where I'm more likely to be okay with a dub. In live action, if you're watching the performance and voice doesn't match up to the movement of the mouth, the result is jarring, but in animation not only is that less of an issue, but sometimes they even redo the animation of the mouths to match the dub. That doesn't excuse bad dubs, of course, but a bad dub will be a bad dub even if you think dubs are always superior.
posted by juv3nal at 5:09 PM on February 20, 2020 [5 favorites]


I watch a lot of subtitled films and as long as it's a good story, I usually forget that I'm even reading them after a few minutes.

Not only do I forget I’m reading, my brain apparently melds the content of the subtitles with the emotional tone of the spoken performance so that when I think about certain scenes afterward I remember them as though the actors were speaking English, even though I know they weren’t.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 5:13 PM on February 20, 2020 [6 favorites]


I started watching pretty much everything with subtitles a while back when seemingly every single show and movie started mixing the dialogue somewhere down here and all of the gunshots/explosions/action noises WAY THE FUCK UP HERE, leaving me scrambling for the volume button on the remote every five minutes.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 5:19 PM on February 20, 2020 [39 favorites]


Miyazaki fans -- I've watched Princess Mononoke dubbed probably half a dozen times, and I feel like there might be something I'm missing because of the dub. Would you guess this is true? If so, whats a good way to get a hold of a well-subtitled version? Would most DVD/Blu-ray versions work?
posted by wildblueyonder at 5:21 PM on February 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


I’m watching Sacred Games on Netflix and they only subtitle the Hindi, not the English, even when the characters a whispering against a loud background. Thanks! Good thing I read the novel!
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:21 PM on February 20, 2020


I knit or otherwise use my hands 100% of the time when I watch TV, so I’m firmly in the dub camp — and I wish Netflix made it easier to find dubbed stuff, because right now you have to dig into the audio menu on every single interesting-looking show.

I saw Parasite in the theater because I knew I’d never watch it otherwise.
posted by liet at 5:22 PM on February 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


but sometimes they even redo the animation of the mouths to match the dub

...and now on consideration I'm wondering if there's a way to automatically deepfake this for live action. That'd be weird, wouldn't it?
posted by juv3nal at 5:26 PM on February 20, 2020 [2 favorites]


I prefer subs in the theatre, because if it's a movie worth paying to watch in the theatre, I'd probably like to hear the original performance over a dubbed version. At home, where I use movies and tv shows as light entertainment and background noise, often while doing other things, I would have to choose dubs because I'm not watching attentively enough to read subs.

I really dislike the whole condescending intellectual bullshit of 'oh, you're too lazy / dumb to read the subs.' It's just such shitty behaviour and it keeps people from watching foreign films at all because it's not good enough for them to choose a foreign film they probably don't know all that much about over an American film they have had advertised to them heavily, they also have to be willing to read sub-titles or they're doing it wrong. Most people can read. Doesn't mean that's how they want to watch a movie.
posted by jacquilynne at 5:53 PM on February 20, 2020 [4 favorites]


I'd like to see more experimentation with subtitles, now that super-duper-hi-def TV monitors are common. I was watching Black Lightning the other day, and I was struck by how well the text bubbles (displayed when a character received a text message) were displayed (and followed the motion of the device) and easily readable. Comic books broke out of the hand-lettered speech bubble a long time ago; I'd like to see TV and film step up and present subtitles in a more dynamic and interesting fashion.

In sub vs dub, I prefer subtitles because I can sometimes suss out the thinking of the translator who wrote the subtitle. Favorite example: there was this Japanese anime in which the good guys were chasing a bad guy. The bad guy ran through a doorway and slammed the door closed behind him. The good guys were brought up and couldn't open the door.

So, in the original Japanese, one of the good guys, a priest, shouts "Shimete!" (Closed!) But the way he pronounces it, it sounds a lot like "Shimata!" (Also, "closed!" But also, "dammit!") The other good guy gives the priest the hairy eyeball, like, "dude, you're a priest, watch your language.")

The subtitle for the priest's line was "Aw, shut!" Which I think nicely captured the ambiguity of the original line.
posted by SPrintF at 6:00 PM on February 20, 2020 [28 favorites]


I just wish the quality and vividness of sub translations was a little bit higher. While the point about reading time mentioned in the article is well taken, I've seen so many instances in which a deliciously vivid insult in a language I have some familiarity with is merely translated as "don't be stupid" or something like that. Rather than a concern about length and reading time, there seems to be an underlying fear that foreign expressions that don't exist in english will be lost on the audience and this approach seems ripe for some reevaluation.
posted by beisny at 6:11 PM on February 20, 2020 [8 favorites]


I accused everyone I watched anime with in college of being perverts if they vocally preferred subs. I'd tease them about not wanting to miss the high-pitched Japanese girl voices. I came to this opinion because my eyesight was too poor to enjoy subs. It was just a fortunate coincidence that dubs was also the non-parvy option
posted by Space Coyote at 6:15 PM on February 20, 2020


My dyslexic husband doesn’t enjoy subtitles as much as I do; it just takes too much of his concentration to read them and keep up, and so he ends up having a different viewing experience than I have. (I still turn them on even for stuff in English when I can get away with it because otherwise I swear I miss half the dialogue.)
posted by beandip at 6:19 PM on February 20, 2020


Subs and dubs at the same time so you have two translations to compare to each other.
posted by Pyry at 6:19 PM on February 20, 2020 [5 favorites]


It's like a translation issue. I'm a fan of international cinema, & I'm stuck in the muddle of the sub/dub debate. It often depends on the subtlety of the translator hired in either situation. When there's a lot of text/dialogue it does distract from the visuals.

I watched a lot of Canadian TV with English subtitles when I was hanging out with my hearing impaired dad. Fun times. Quirky stuff.

My fave cinema artist is Andrei Tarkovsky, but the dialouge is sparse, so you have the time to take in the images without distraction.

Das Boot (1981) had pretty good English dubbing, because the dialogue was terse.

Closely Watched Trains (1966) had a subtitle like "you fell" (?) which I was told is more like "you have a problem with gravity"...

In The Belly of The Dragon (Dans le ventre du dragon) (1989) has a crazy scene where everyone starts shouting in Quebec Joual, and the sur-title translation person throws up hands & whatever. (Yeah, okay: I think everyone should start asking for watching this brilliant obscurity)
posted by ovvl at 6:27 PM on February 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


MsWindo has subtitles on for most any movie. I find them distracting. You do actually get to "hear" some garbled dialog better. But, reading <> watching, as mentioned up thread.
posted by Windopaene at 6:50 PM on February 20, 2020


Also to consider: The American with Disabilities Act of 1990 requires that films distributed on media such as DVD and BD (not sure how streaming is affected as this didn't existing when the ADA was passed) include English language Subtitles for the Deaf and Hearing Impaired (AKA SDH), regardless of whether the spoken language of the original film is English or something else.

As a consequence and as a way to save money, dubbed films distributed on these media may only provide English subtitles for the dubbed English vocals, which are often a compromise between between the most semantically accurate translation of the original language and timing of the delivery. These are referred to as "dub subs." All of the Disney Miazaki releases, for example, use dub subs, so watching with English subs on is identical to watching the dubbed version. (The new releases from Gkids don't have this problem, if I recall correctly, and use the old subs from the pre-Disney days.)

The downside is that linguistic nuances that might have have been communicated with well translated subs may be lost. The issue isn't with the SDH requirement: it's laziness and/or cheapness on the part of film distributors that they don't meet the requirements of the ADA *and* provide the most accurate translations.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 6:57 PM on February 20, 2020 [8 favorites]


Something I think is worth thinking about is how subtitles intersect with the problem of watching movies while blind. I have yet to see a subtitled movie or show with English audio description, and that would probably be a ridiculous amount of work, on top of finding a way to describe the action. Dubbing is superior in theory because it allows only one description track to be required, vs having to handle both the subs and explaining the visual detail.

Admittedly, my situation is a special case. :_
posted by Alensin at 7:00 PM on February 20, 2020 [3 favorites]


(Alensin: I authored a number of big studio DVDs with Descriptive Service audio tracks, often in a more than one languages. Some of this might depend on the country.)
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 7:03 PM on February 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


For whatever reason, my brain works better with written language than spoken language. I understand things faster and with less effort when I read them, and my writing is clearer and more elegant than my speech. This was true even when I was learning a foreign language; the written part came much easier than the verbal part. So I keep subtitles on for everything, despite having normal hearing.

Miyazaki fans -- I've watched Princess Mononoke dubbed probably half a dozen times, and I feel like there might be something I'm missing because of the dub.

I remember when the dub was first released people jokingly called it Princess Monotone because of Claire Dane’s inexpressive performance.

In sub vs dub, I prefer subtitles because I can sometimes suss out the thinking of the translator who wrote the subtitle.

I seem to recall watching a subbed anime back in the day (Excel Saga maybe?) with culture- or language-specific jokes explained in parentheticals. That seemed like an interesting compromise.
posted by dephlogisticated at 7:25 PM on February 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


Insert Clever Name Here, That's interesting. Did they include films which would have had subtitles if viewed in the US, say? I'm just wondering where the question of a foreign language film intersects with providing audio description, or not.

I'm not seeing any audio description for Parasite, for instance.
posted by Alensin at 7:29 PM on February 20, 2020


Time for a story! In 1978, the Australian government launched the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), which was then and remains a national multicultural TV broadcaster. It was an outgrowth of 'ethnic' radio stations in various cities, which were in turn products of changing social attitudes to language diversity. The early broadcasting SBS did was news, documentaries, and other programmes imported from the countries of migrant communities, broadcast in the original language, but subtitled into English: the point was to serve both audience who wanted/needed to hear their own language spoken, and to increase access to non-English content to the entire community. They quickly expanded into foreign films, international news, and current affairs, all of which were translated and subtitled. (It also got into soccer, which is a different story).

All this was right at a time when video and broadcast technology was making subtitling technically easier, faster, and cheaper, far cheaper than dubbing (which had the necessary cost of voice actors, as well as translators). It was suddenly possible to do things like screen Latin American telenovelas, or Asian game shows, produced cheap and fast in the original, shipped by express videotape, but then also have a sophisticated translated set of subtitles in the timely rebroadcast. SBS accidentally found itself as a world specialist in translation services and subtitling practice, and it employed a very large number of language specialists, in dozens and dozens of languages, who themselves pushed the technology of subtitling. By the mid-1980s SBS was one of the largest single employers of subtitlers in the world.

Subtitling for broadcast is a specific form of translation that also has to take visual action into account:
She said good subtitling meant shortening a script, making it brief and clear enough so that people looked at the picture and at the text at the same time. "You don't want to see them read a long text and then miss the picture," she said. "That's the art of subtitling."
Not everybody is as conscientious as that, and certainly not contemporary distributors, who only add closed-captions to films because they're legally obliged to, and work from inappropriate script sources (c.f. sub-dubs). But to go to the political question in the Vox article:
The claim that, as Drum put it, “everyone would prefer to watch movies made in their native tongue,” may not seem inherently political
This is absolutely pertinent, because experience bears it out! The Australian experience of government-sponsored multicultural policy is that when given the opportunity to watch movies and news and other TV in their first language, people who speak those languages will support it strongly, and if it's done well, will get converse support from monolingual English speakers. As long, anyway, as the quality of the subtitle translation respects the content, and as long as there is financial support—industry policy—to make subtitling a part of cultural life.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 7:30 PM on February 20, 2020 [14 favorites]


The flipping-back-and-forth between Spanish and English subtitles Los Espookys really tripped my brain up, especially when it happened rapidly. I would get into the flow of reading the English and then people would start talking in English and the subtitles would switch to Spanish -- but my brain would still try to read them and for a moment the English I was hearing sounded like gobbledegook.
posted by treepour at 7:33 PM on February 20, 2020 [7 favorites]


I'm personally a fan of subtitles (and like others here, I turn them on whenever the sound is muddy, too). But there are a lot of reasons a person might prefer dubbing, and in my perfect world every film/show would be available in both (plus the audio description, that is something I wasn't aware of before).
posted by Dip Flash at 7:56 PM on February 20, 2020 [6 favorites]


Man, am I the only person without impaired hearing who watches everything with subtitles on, including English movies and TV?

I have perfect hearing according to a test done last year and yet I watch EVERYTHING with subtitles. My auditory processing is garbage. Earlier today a professor started playing a Youtube video and I watched him SPECIFICALLY GO AND TURN THE SUBTITLES OFF, WHICH HAD BEEN ON BY DEFAULT. I WANTED TO SCREAM.

I also read blazingly fast. Like, I was recently watching a lecture on Youtube and had limited time, so I turned on captions and put it on 2.5x speed (which was unintelligible, from an auditory perspective). The captions were still too slow for me. So like, there's no situation where I am not going to be able to read the words quickly enough. But I do have sympathy for people who read slower. Also, sometimes I put on a subbed non-English film and then forget I can't understand Japanese/Korean/French and try and do something else (draw, knit, fold clothes). That doesn't go well.
posted by brook horse at 8:02 PM on February 20, 2020 [5 favorites]


As regards Audio Descriptive Service tracks for disc media: I am going to have to defer to someone perhaps more versed in the ADA. I recall authoring several discs for Sony (e.g. Marie Antoinette) destined for global distribution, so North and South America, Europe and Asia, that included ADS tracks for foreign languages but possibly not for English.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 8:02 PM on February 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


I'm all for subs, but I can't forget how Magnolia distro got legendarily busted for shit subs in the DVD release of Let the Right One In. I wonder how much I've missed because some fatcat wanted to save pocket change on legit works of art.
posted by j_curiouser at 8:14 PM on February 20, 2020 [5 favorites]


I'd also like to add: my favorite example of how a film experience can be deepened through both dubbing and subs, check out Tekkonkinkreet. The English dub makes it easier to follow the visual action and the subs, which are not identical to the dubbing, add details to the narrative that would be otherwise lost/missed.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 8:19 PM on February 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


We watch everything with subtitles. This is primarily because my wife and I are not fluent in each others languages (we can talk just fine, but watching a movie is much harder!). So either we're watching English shows with Japanese subtitles, or the reverse. It does mean we can't watch other-language films together (difficult to display multiple subtitle tracks simultaneously).

Even before I met her, though, I was always a subtitle fan. And also one of those people who often turns on closed captioning just to make sure I don't miss dialog / etc.

My big complaint is against streaming services. Other than Netflix, all of them either support only English subtitles or maybe also Spanish and French. Even for movies that obviously have Japanese subtitles (I end up buying Blurays for some things from Japan, so I know a translation was done for those; and for others I know that if you are in that country you DO have access to the subtitles). Netflix is better but takes a lot of fiddling (an English account won't see Japanese subtitles. You have to set your primary language to Japanese for them to show up).

It is quite possible that this is more the fault of rightsholders than the streaming services (also VOD services like Amazon or Google Play have the same English-only problem).

A VPN technically solves some of this, except that now I'm streaming video from across the world which obviously results in fairly degraded performance compared to what should be nicely edge-cached files.
posted by thefoxgod at 8:23 PM on February 20, 2020


wildblueyonder: If so, whats a good way to get a hold of a well-subtitled version? Would most DVD/Blu-ray versions work?

(I don't think I've seen this answered yet but) yes, DVD/Blu-ray versions of anime (especially Ghibli) come with the original language track and subtitles. The last time I saw dub-only was anime in Suncoast stores on VHS.
posted by lesser weasel at 8:35 PM on February 20, 2020 [2 favorites]


If I am gonna watch a foreign cartoon I would really rather watch it dubbed, because I trained to be an animator and I want to let all the parts of my brain that have been trained to analyze and dissect animation spend their time doing that, rather than constantly try to make my visual cortex parse words off the screen. I read fast, you would think it doesn’t matter, but it does, oh it matters so much.

I’m fine with subs in live-action movies. My brain isn’t going to try to start using half its capacity to see and contemplate every single frame in parallel with the broader strokes of the moving imagery the way it will with drawings.
posted by egypturnash at 8:57 PM on February 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


I don't think it has to be an absolute choice as they both have their advantages. I'm partial to subtitles for everything (including in the languages I speak) but I can appreciate a well done (or extremely poorly done) dubbed track. I mean yeah I can watch say a kung fu film or an Italian western with subtitles and if they're well done I can pick up some nuances or jokes or references that wouldn't be in the dub track but the subtitles may not be capturing the spirit of the film or helping me engage with the visuals in the way the director intended.

Take something like the Simpsons. Its dubbed in a variety of ways for different language markets but an interesting example, for those who weren't aware, there's a European French dubbed Simpsons and a Quebec French Simpsons. Both are in French and both are broadly telling the same story but they are conveying the humour in subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) different ways. So yes an Euro French speaker could watch the Simpsons with subtitles and wonder about the American pop culture references and have to think hard to get the joke thus ruining the joke or they can watch in their own dialect and get an approximation that is suited for their culture.

The worst kind of "dubbing" I've experienced was a style of dubbing where you hear a single person on the audio speaking over the voices of people in the film. I've seen this a few times with Russian films so I wonder if it is something they commonly do.
posted by Ashwagandha at 9:04 PM on February 20, 2020 [4 favorites]


Likewise, in occupied countries where the Nazi regime required all films to be dubbed into German during WWII, dubbing remains the most common form of non-native-language film viewing, and the German dubbing market is still the largest globally.

Movies I saw in (then West) Germany in the late 80s when I was an exchange student that were in German: Top Gun, Aliens, Top Secret (literally the German version is funnier than the English version because they play with regional German accents and idioms in a way which adds a layer of humor)... There were others, but I can't remember them at the moment.

Yes, I just said that there are layers to German humor.

Also, like there were all these US television shows that were dubbed. Miami Vice made its big splash premiere (in German) on television while I was living there. I remember that Quincy, M.E. had an alternate audio track that was the original English and when my host family (fans of the show) first heard Jack Klugman's real voice they burst out laughing because he was a deep resonant bass in the German dub.

It was fascinating because there were movies from countries all over Europe that were dubbed, so I was watching all manner of stuff all in this language I (then) spoke fluently and it all just came out fine. The German dubbing industry is great at somehow choosing word order and rhythm that work well with the original actor's facial movements so it feels natural after a tiny bit of uncanny valley time.

English dubbing has never ever been as good as German dubbing.

That said, Star Blazers was hella great when I was a kid, and the weird Frankenstein Monster that was the whole Robotech series actually worked for me, even if it wasn't at all what the source material might have been.

I dislike subtitles when watching movies at home. Too many distractions, usually watching during dinner/evening. I don't mind them at all in the theater, because I'm much more focussed. My husbear watches all his television with subtitles on, whether written or automatically generated. People are different.

I've been meaning to watch Parasite, but I'll have to actually block out a time to turn down the lights and focus if I'm doing it in my living room.
posted by hippybear at 9:21 PM on February 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


Also, the full 6 hour Das Boot in the original German with English Subtitles is the best way to watch that "movie". Evocative acting, plus translation. And it's not an action film, so it's okay to read.
posted by hippybear at 9:26 PM on February 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


English dubbing has never ever been as good as German dubbing.

A friend of mine, while hitchhiking through Germany in the 80s, ended up couch surfing at a place where he had the surreal experience of watching Hogan's Heroes dubbed into German with a bunch of Germans.
posted by Ashwagandha at 9:27 PM on February 20, 2020 [2 favorites]


When Life is Beautiful was the Parasite of 1998, Roberto Benigni made some waves by preferring a dubbed version over the subtitled one. He disliked subtitles compromising dialog by favoring space-efficient words over accurate translations. American cineastes were perturbed by his preference, as I recall. I was living in Italy at the time, and Italian dubbing can be amazingly well-done. Certain voice actors are paired with Hollywood counterparts throughout their careers.
posted by St. Oops at 10:02 PM on February 20, 2020 [3 favorites]


There have been occasions when I've turned on both dubs and subs. I've been kinda surprised at how often subs can be shitty. Sadly, dubs are also pretty commonly just poorly performed.

I did get pissed, though, for, of all movies, the Son of Godzilla dvd release. For whatever reason, Toho decided to upgrade the dubbing to something more "legit" in their view. Unfortunately, for English speaking audiences who grew up with of old dub that was done in the 60s, it was a travesty. I had to rely on the slowly degrading VHS release. It took a few years, but fortunately, someone ripped the audio from the old VHS release and synced it with the clean dvd video to recreate a good copy that can be found on archive.org.
posted by 2N2222 at 10:06 PM on February 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


I spent so many stoned hours watching the original English dub of Akira and finally decoding all of it that I've never been able to enjoy the newer English dub.

"Just when my coil's hitting the green line!"
posted by hippybear at 10:08 PM on February 20, 2020 [2 favorites]


I fleetingly mentioned this whole debate in the last Parasite thread, about how it's mired in monocultural worldview, but seriously, other than the points regarding physical and learning disabilities and adaptive tech, so much of it is due to cultural upbringing and norms that I sincerely can't relate with most of the commentary. I mean, sure, if I grew up with Italy-quality dubs I would see the value and prefer well-made dubs, but I watch shows in the cinema that have at least two languages* running at the bottom and the local telenovelas have bilingual subs that codeswitches together with the characters' dialogue that I genuinely appreciate the art of good subtitles.

What I dislike about dubbing as traditionally practiced is the notion that it must also adapt all cultural cues in the original text eg Sailormoon dubs (we didn't get the American one but the HK Cantonese one). So I learned nothing about Japan because everything has been localised. Yet, by watching shows in the original expression, that's how I pick up little things about the world I'm in. To use a fannish example, how do you figure so many non-american fanfic writers can get a lot of the worldbuilding right, and yet the same can't be said for Americans writing about IPs set elsewhere, even an Anglo country like the UK?

So maybe I feel a bit mean about it, because I didn't ask to be multicultural citizen of the world, when all I did was watch TV. People could stand to learn about other places.

*And imagine if each language has noticeably different grammar eg in their subject-verb order!
posted by cendawanita at 10:38 PM on February 20, 2020 [11 favorites]


Also, to reorient away from the Anglophonic focus, for a while in my media market, all of the Korean and Japanese dramas were got from the Taiwanese distribution, and they came in Mandarin. So on the one hand, I got to pick up Taiwanese-accented Mandarin, it was also genuinely disruptive when you're trying to pick up either of those two languages, and when you can tell the Mandarin audio doesn't track with the lip-reading. But it can be cool to hear the Sinicized pronunciations of everyone's name, I guess. I just didn't manage to learn any Japanese or Korean expressions.

But! To offer another anecdote: When I was a teen, I remember watching Mission: Impossible in Turkish, and I remember being puzzled and the Malaysian student who we were visiting said, it's because most of the population is illiterate. And I think that's a big part of it, because I remembered all the names and places weren't localised, hence my initial feeling of oddness.
posted by cendawanita at 11:13 PM on February 20, 2020


I prefer subs 90% of the time, but there was something magical about watching old kung fu Sonny Cheeba type movies that were so poorly dubbed. My HS days of being stoned watching poorly dubbed movies I do miss so.
posted by AugustWest at 11:21 PM on February 20, 2020


I seem to remember Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer being dubbed and finding them charming. I'm not sure what the subbed versions might be like.
posted by hippybear at 11:25 PM on February 20, 2020


According to my Cantonese-speaking friends, not that much better. But that's the general consensus with (Stephen) Chow Sing Chi's movies - his movies come heavy with punning and cultural references so any translation that needs to run in real time without annotations won't be the best. Half the time it flies over my head.
posted by cendawanita at 11:46 PM on February 20, 2020


I think most native English speakers will never understand how everything is subtitled when you live in a non-english country.

So much this.

Growing up in the Netherlands everything that wasn't aimed at (young) children was subbed: American movies, English tv series, German krimis and French romcoms, it didn't matter.

When everything has subtitles, reading them becomes easy and all the usual objections that it distracts from watching the movie or whatever become irrelevant. You can take in both text and imagery in one swoop, if you watch subtitled movies often enough.

Aesthetically, subs can only give you the bare bones gist of what's said in the original, but what it preserves is the voice acting, the accent, the character coming through the voice.

Dubs can be far more expressive than subs can ever be, but sacrifice the original context of the dialogue, as everybody who has watched a John Wayne movie dubbed in German can tell. Dialect especially, or how do you translate a southern US accent into Deutsch? Swabian? Bavarian? Ost-Fries? In any case, the cultural connotations are lost.

This why most, if not all anime dubbed in English grates when I have no problems with the same voice actors doing an American series like RWBY or She-Ra. Even objectively good dubs just sound wrong.

Not that you can actually learn a language from watching movies in it, but there's also the nerdy pleasure of starting to recognise words and sentences in what used to be noise that subs give over dubs to me.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:46 AM on February 21, 2020 [3 favorites]


I just wish the quality and vividness of sub translations was a little bit higher.

Crunchyroll pays their translators/subbers $80 per episode.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:00 AM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]


I watched Howl's Moving Castle with my wife (who's Japanese) a while ago, and we compared the different versions and cant to the conclusion that the subtitles were a utilitarian précis of what was being said in the Japanese track, but that the dub was a completely different text, more colloquial but also more simplistic (to the extent of sometimes having off-screen dialogue to explain what what happening on-screen, something that wasn't in either the original Japanese or subtitles).

Flying to South America in the days when there were a few cathode ray tube monitors dotted around the cabin rather than seatback entertainment systems with either untranslated Spanish dubs or when I couldn't be bothered enough to put on the headphones at all taught me that about 95% of dialogue in an average movie is unnecessary and most of the other 5% can be deduced from context. And, of course, the bootleg B&W version of Fury Road where all the dialogue has been removed - you only miss it about seven times in the whole film, but that's a special case.
posted by Grangousier at 2:15 AM on February 21, 2020


Comic books broke out of the hand-lettered speech bubble a long time ago; I'd like to see TV and film step up and present subtitles in a more dynamic and interesting fashion.

This is probably a bad idea for accessibility. Some people need subtitles because of hearing issues, as well as the obvious language ones. Heavily stylising subtitles risks making them unusable. The current standards for DVD/BluRay/DVB/etc don't actually give the film creators/distributors much or any control over how the subs are displayed - they're encoded as time stamped text, and the device you're watching on determines how exactly they're rendered. This is ideal, as it allows the end user a degree of control (depending on their viewing device of course) over how the subs are displayed. Which means you're giving everyone the best chance of being able to meaningfully use them.

Fancy lettering and colour, presentation, etc, would effectively need to be pre-rendered, and now people can't increase our decrease the font size, put it in a font or colour they find easy to read, or have the subs display on a separate monitor or in a separate window, etc, etc. You reduce their utility dramatically.
posted by Dysk at 2:41 AM on February 21, 2020 [10 favorites]


I like subs because I'm less likely to notice a really bad anime voice actor when I have no idea what they're saying or what accent they have. It's jarring when a Japanese schoolkid opens their mouths and speaks like a thirty-something southern Californian actor. I totally don't notice when the Japanese VA is just as bad, because it's anime and its somehow supposed to sound that way.
posted by Eleven at 3:03 AM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]


I think most native English speakers will never understand how everything is subtitled when you live in a non-english country.

The vast majority of Americans never watch foreign films or TV.
posted by octothorpe at 4:02 AM on February 21, 2020 [2 favorites]


For U.S. Audiences, Foreign Cinema’s ‘One-Inch’ Wall of Subtitles Seen a Mile High
A Jan. 23-24 Morning Consult survey of 2,200 U.S. adults found that when compared to other genres and types of films, foreign language films — defined for the survey as films that are produced outside of the United States where the primary language spoken is not English — were the least popular, with a net favorability (the share who felt favorably minus the share who felt unfavorably) of minus 25.
posted by octothorpe at 4:40 AM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]


The dubbed version of Das Boot is good not necessarily because the language is terse, but because all of the principal actors were bilingual and provided their own translations. Which corrects one of the most jarring issues (to me) regarding dubs - the voices simply so often don’t seem to be correct for a given actor.

Of course when I do watch Das Boot I prefer the German version. I am fine with subtitles. My wife is not. She can’t read fast enough to process both the images and the words, and reading for her takes more effort than it should - she has to focus carefully to read, and the effort of concentrating tires her quickly.

So we are torn on Parasite. I want to watch it, in subtitles. She wants to watch it, but needs a dubbed version. I don’t want to watch it dubbed the first time through but don’t want to watch it without her. Can’t win!

Years ago when we watched Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, we used the dubbed audio track. She liked the movie. When she went to bed I watched it again - in subtitles - the entire film twice in one night. I was impressed at how they had carefully changed the dialogue to make the English dub better fit the facial movements of the actors, so it didn’t feel dubbed, but the subtitles showed how very differently the dialogue could express the same general things when freed from that constraint. It was interesting to compare the two directly.

Funny subtitle story, my wife decided to upgrade our TV because she couldn’t read the subtitles in a few shows where some lines in Spanish or French were subbed in otherwise all-English movies. The subs were so tiny that it hurt her eyes. So we bought a MUCH larger TV at her insistence, which made me very happy! And the subtitles were still too small. That was the day I learned that Netflix sets subtitle size across all your devices at once, and you can only adjust that size from their website interface. But hey, giant new TV. It was worth it.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:19 AM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]


The vast majority of Americans never watch foreign films or TV.

That's... my point?

When everything is tailored towards you, why bother seeking out something that it isn't? Subtitles and all the hand wringing about them are just an easy excuse, every non-english country in the world already deals with them just fine.
posted by simmering octagon at 5:21 AM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]


I just wonder if Poland is the only country where the majority of TV is voice-overed instead. As in, you hear the original audio and a guy - almost always a guy - reading the dialogue in Polish. You learn to tune him out eventually, but it's much more intrusive than either dubs or subs.

Mind you, I spent my young childhood watching voice-overed cartoons or ones in original languages (thank you 90s piracy!) so now dubs into Polish read absolutely foreign to my ears...
posted by I claim sanctuary at 5:53 AM on February 21, 2020 [2 favorites]


I usually watch shows with closed captioning turned on, but not stand-up comedy. The captions often give away the joke before the comedian says it.
posted by Billiken at 5:56 AM on February 21, 2020 [2 favorites]


Subtitles are seriously no big deal. He's right - it's a 1-inch barrier to overcome, and I've never seen a subtitled film that distracted me enough to not enjoy the hell out of it. He's also right about the effect Parasite had on me - it's plainly obvious I'm missing out on literally hundreds of fantastic foreign movies.
posted by Lipstick Thespian at 6:15 AM on February 21, 2020


As far as Ghibli and dubbed vs subtitles, I guess my yardstick is Totoro, and the vhs copy a roommate had in college. When the cat bus is changing it’s destination (where the Japanese writing flips up), the dubbing has this hell’s in, screeching voice sort of shout singing “next stop” where the original just had the text changing, and the subtitles just announce what the signboard says.

That, and it took me years, but wow, in the Japanese, Satsuki is amazingly cruel to Mei when they fight, and my memory of even the subtitles was that they sort of glossed over it. It’s not just an older sister being mean, it’s a terrified girl taking all of her fears and frustrations out on her little sister who just doesn’t get what’s going on with mom being in the hospital, and damn, Mei has solid reasons for bursting into tears.
posted by Ghidorah at 6:19 AM on February 21, 2020 [3 favorites]


I do think it's important to discern between subtitles (which is text integrated into the actual picture of the film) and closed captioning (which is text that is electronically integrated into a video to be displayed by the viewing device if turned on). They are two separate things and yield very different results while watching.
posted by hippybear at 6:19 AM on February 21, 2020 [3 favorites]


DUB LIFE NOW, DUB LIFE FOREVER.

Both are distracting to me, but dubs are less so, 'cause I'm looking at the whole screen as opposed to the bottom. And holy shit if the sub font is messed up, I just turn the film off. Don't come at me with some twisted, knock off of Helvetica, don't even try me bruh!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:26 AM on February 21, 2020


I just wonder if Poland is the only country where the majority of TV is voice-overed instead. As in, you hear the original audio and a guy - almost always a guy - reading the dialogue in Polish. You learn to tune him out eventually, but it's much more intrusive than either dubs or subs.

Very common in Eastern European countries, I think. Although, in Romania, it's often a woman. In fact for decades during communism, it was a singular, specific woman named Irina Nistor. She was both the official government tv translator and, in an open secret, the translator of many if not most of incoming bootlegs of Western movies.

The Romanian government officially considered these bootlegs criminal, but informally allowed them... because officials also liked to watch them. Ironically, these bootlegged films--many of them jingoistic action films with the likes of Chuck Norris or Sylvester Stallone--were often cited as inspiration by young people who brought on the revolution.

There's a truly entertaining documentary about this phenomenon called Chuck Norris Vs. Communism. It's currently streaming in the US on Amazon Prime. It's a doc, but it's paced like a Cold War thriller... but with a sense of humor. Truly a fun film.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:49 AM on February 21, 2020 [12 favorites]


The current standards for DVD/BluRay/DVB/etc don't actually give the film creators/distributors much or any control over how the subs are displayed - they're encoded as time stamped text, and the device you're watching on determines how exactly they're rendered.

I don't think this is true in practice. Subtitle tracks on DVDs are bitmaps, not text. Some digging into the Blu-Ray standards has been inconclusive; a lot of Blu-Rays apparently use the PGS bitmap codec for sub streams but there's also functionality in the Blu-Ray standard for text overlay on screen, and some Blu-Rays might use that?

Some DVDs do include EIA-608 captions in their picture data. The CEA-708 standard implements similar functionality for digital video streams, and might be on Blu-Ray and is definitely on some streaming services.
posted by jackbishop at 6:58 AM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]


When visiting France I saw billboards for an animated feature (Sharktails?) and they prominently featured the names of the voice actors (presumably well-known stars) who did the French voices. That struck me as odd, but I guess it could be a draw. After all, animated features often use big-name actors for voices in the originals.
posted by sjswitzer at 8:23 AM on February 21, 2020


That struck me as odd, but I guess it could be a draw. After all, animated features often use big-name actors for voices in the originals.

That's how it works in the US too for movies marketed as semi-major releases, like the Ghibli films. Ponyo by the Sea, for example, had Matt Damon, Tina Fey, Liam Neeson, and Cate Blanchett dubbing the original dialogue.
posted by gusottertrout at 8:38 AM on February 21, 2020 [3 favorites]


sjswitzer, that’s standard here in Japan, a lot of times the press conferences (a weirdly big thing here) for new movies will have the dubbing actors talking about the movie, and yeah, it’s usually famous people (celebrities and pop musicians) doing their voices overs, especially for children’s movies.
posted by Ghidorah at 8:38 AM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]


Which leads to the idea that dubbing can be an art-form (or at least craft) in itself. When will we have an Oscar for best voice-over acting?
posted by sjswitzer at 8:45 AM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]


When Life is Beautiful was the Parasite of 1998, Roberto Benigni made some waves by preferring a dubbed version over the subtitled one. He disliked subtitles compromising dialog by favoring space-efficient words over accurate translations.

This. A decade or so before that, the French films Jean de Florette and its continuation Manson of the Spring played at the rep cinema where I worked.

The story follows a multi-generational conflict between two families. Characters often undertake secret and cruel actions to keep their rivals down and when called on it, insist they are blameless, saying they had no choice, but were compelled by “la force du destin.” The musical theme of both movies is a melody from a Verdi piece called La Forza del Destino.” One need not speak much French or Italian to work out what these phrases mean in English, yet the subtitles rendered this phase as the pallid “fate” every time it was spoken.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:20 AM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]


I think perhaps some people didn't RTFA: there are a number of countries, notably Spain and Germany, where almost everything is dubbed. IIRC, everything (scripted) on broadcast television in Germany is legally required to be dubbed. This is not as simple as "Americans are xenophobic, but everyone else isn't." Americans certainly are, but some other countries are also intolerant of subtitles.

Furthermore, I'm not comfortable with conflating the need for accessibility for the disabled (such as SDH for the hearing impaired and AD for the visually impaired) with personal preference and convenience, along with covert or overt chauvinism. The article does a very good job discussing and distinguishing these issues and it does everyone a disservice to ignore this.

Personally, I'm almost always going to prefer good subtitling over good dubbing, but that's partly because I'm neither visually impaired nor a slow or dyslexic reader. Given that, I enjoy hearing the verbal performances even when I don't understand the language; both because it's fully the actors' filmed performance, but also because I enjoy picking up on the occasional correlating word, particularly names.

If subtitles for a given person are not a hindrance to comprehension, then I think it's arguable that they are "better". But that's often not the case.

Given that the prejudice against foreign films (even dubbed) in the US is very strong, those of us who watch foreign films in the first place are highly self-selecting and not representative of the majority. We're more likely to be fast readers, we're probably more accustomed to hearing languages we don't speak, and we're more likely to be cinephiles who highly value the work in its original form. Thus we both have good reasons to strongly prefer subtitles and also to be real condescending dicks about it to those who do not.

If it were the case, as it is for many other people around the world, we Americans simply by necessity of availability watched a lot of media not in our native language, then both what we were watching and those of us watching it would be much more varied and much more representative. We therefore would be more acclimated to subtitles yet nevertheless likely would prefer dubbing when it was available. But this isn't us. Americans and anglophones in general, by virtue of American cultural imperialism, are in the exceptional position of having most of what we want in our native language, with only a small, high cultural capital elite deliberately seeking out media in languages we do not understand. I don't think we can productively discuss this without keeping these things in mind, especially if we're doing any sort of cross-cultural comparison.

Surely it should go without saying that with regard to disability, all accommodation is good and should be the goal; for some it's subtitles for the hearing impaired and the deaf, for others it's audio description for the visually impaired. Neither of those are, strictly speaking, subtitles or dubs. The dyslexic, as well, should be accommodated.

Otherwise, subtitling or dubbing is a matter of preference and circumstance. The small minority of us who are anglophones who seek out foreign language media, all else being equal, have good reasons to largely prefer subtitles. This is not necessarily true for everyone else.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:32 AM on February 21, 2020 [2 favorites]


I'd like more user-customizable options for subtitle/caption display. Especially given our new "filmmakers all have fancy-ass new screens that show twenty million shades of black and want to tell us about them" world where so many new movies and TV shows are all dark, all the time. Having bright white subtitles with no size/color/brightness options can be really annoying in that situation. Having to turn off the captions because I can't otherwise make out anything on screen is not great. Standardizing how this stuff works so that we can all view or listen in ways that meet our needs is good.

I, uh, don't find it surprising that the general preference in a text-based community is for more and better text availability.
posted by asperity at 9:38 AM on February 21, 2020 [2 favorites]


Both are distracting to me, but dubs are less so, 'cause I'm looking at the whole screen as opposed to the bottom.

It’s the opposite for me. With a bad or mediocre dubbing I’m only staring at the mouths. I can read fairly quickly so it’s easy for me to read the subtitle and look back to the rest of the screen
posted by LizBoBiz at 9:56 AM on February 21, 2020


Last year my wife and it did the Studio Ghibli Fest as they brought a new movie to see at local theaters each month. With each movie there was a sub or dub option depending which screening you chose. We alternated for a few months but 1/2 through the year decided we preferred the sub titles.

If we were watching the same films outside of a theatre with potential distractions I don't know that I would reach the same conclusion.
posted by ShakeyJake at 9:57 AM on February 21, 2020


One need not speak much French or Italian to work out what these phrases mean in English, yet the subtitles rendered this phase as the pallid “fate” every time it was spoken.

One of the reasons I personally prefer subtitles is partly this. Subtitles are additive, they maintain the original film as it was and are just an additional layer of information on top of that, while dubbed films are substitutive, they, generally, remove something of the original and replace it with something other, meaning you don't get to hear what isn't translated at all. Dubbing mostly isn't completely accurate either, some idioms and speech are generally lost in both dubbing and subtitling, just for different reasons. More volume of speech isn't necessarily better when so much is still conveyed by the actors speaking in their own tongue.

That isn't to say subtitles should be the only choice or are for everyone. I read quickly and easily enough where there isn't any significant feeling of effort or loss of focus on the visuals in reading subtitles, but that isn't true for everyone. Also it is kinda important to note we don't process written and spoken language in quite the same way, so there are other differences involved as well, though those are hard to quantify precisely but likely do change the manner of appreciation to some degree.

I have a lingering suspicion, for example, that part of Bergman's ascendancy among critics outside Sweden was because reading the dialogue made it easier to take in than hearing it for how "unnatural" some of the existential debates would feel in normal conversational flow and for not seeming quite as theatrical or stage oriented as it might were one's attention not split between reading and image. On the other hand, I also suspect one of the reasons Kurosawa also became an earlyish critical favorite was for how physical Mifune was in some of his roles and how, in ways that read easily to the eye, not unlike silent movie actors, making the "translation" of emotion much smoother than with some other actors, Giulietta Masina, who was in a number of Fellini's films, also can tend towards added expression in a somewhat similar manner and of course most of the initial post war critical successes tended towards expressive visuals in other formal aspects as well, so the growth in appreciation for cinema as a world wide phenomenon wasn't really the function of the dialogue per se.

On a more basic level, if you read relatively quickly, subtitles tell you what's going to happen/be said before it actually occurs. You take in the information then watch it play out, where in dubbing the synchronization is usually more true to the timing of the original relay of information. Dubbing, on the other hand, often messes up the spatial dynamics of sound/dialogue, where everything sounds flatter than it does in location based recording where depth and different acoustics can better match what the eye sees to what the ear hears. In a similar way, the physical aspect of the actors sometimes seems off in dubbing in a distracting way, as the voice and body don't seem to match or the voice doesn't fit the action/emotion all that well. Some European films, however, are all post dubbed even in original release, sometimes because of how the films are financed, bringing actors together who don't speak the same languages fluently in order to have marketable stars in different countries.
posted by gusottertrout at 10:00 AM on February 21, 2020 [8 favorites]


On a more basic level, if you read relatively quickly, subtitles tell you what's going to happen/be said before it actually occurs.

As someone said upthread there are people who like to turn captioning on even for shows in their native language, and this aspect actually really bugs me sometimes when watching English media with English captions. I don't mind it at all when watching subbed foreign media, though, and I certainly do mind losing the original line readings to a dub.
posted by atoxyl at 10:25 AM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]


When will we have an Oscar for best voice-over acting?

Best voice/overacting? Well, that's Nic Cage, every year, isn't it?
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:07 AM on February 21, 2020 [8 favorites]


My hearing isn't what it used to be, and I often rewind and turn on the subtitles for help. I can't keep them on permanently because I can't avoid reading them even when I don't need or want to, and that drives me bonkers.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 11:09 AM on February 21, 2020


I wonder if, with social media, people are going to get more comfortable with subtitles. For example: I usually scroll through Twitter with my phone on silent. I've noticed that a lot of trailers that pop up in my feed are subtitled, because most people will also have their phones on silent. Also see: the gifset. More generally, we're now having real-time conversations in text (over text).
posted by airmail at 11:12 AM on February 21, 2020 [3 favorites]


Incidentally, on the issue of subtitles generally, I've been taking a class (as I sometimes do) with a lot of in-class film-watching. Several of them have been foreign films (Cocteau's Orphee, Kobayashi's Kwaidan, Murnau's Nosferatu, although that one isn't subtitled, of course), and the class is 25 people squeezed into a narrow classroom. The bottom foot of the projector screen is straight up not visible from the back desks, and it is really not great for the people back there to try to figure out what's going on. Many of us passionately wished for surtitles instead, but unfortunately those don't seem to have caught on outside of opera (where they're a function of the performance being in a physical space rather than on a screen).
posted by jackbishop at 12:02 PM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]


At least for university level classes, it's long bugged me that they spend class time showing movies, relevant excerpts for lectures or whatnot or maybe an occasional short, fine, but it isn't like go to English class to spend your time reading silently together. It just seemed like such a waste of class hours when they could have been spent discussing films and their history instead. It's not like most movies they tend to show in classes are hard to get a hold of for cheap nowadays.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:22 PM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]


There was a Russian dub of "Dude, Where's My Car?" in which one male voice monotonically spoke a Russian translation of all the dialogue, including the eponymous lines:

"Chubak, gdye maya tachka?"
"Chubak, gdye tvaya tachka?"
"Chubak, gdye maya tachka?"
"Chubak, gdye tvaya tachka?"
"Chubak, gdye maya tachka?"
"Chubak, gdye tvaya tachka?"


Which is how I learned that the Russian for "dude" is like the first two syllables of "Chewbacca".

I appreciate learning about other people's experiences and preferences in this thread and maybe I will try dubs now, after years of not trying them!
posted by brainwane at 2:06 PM on February 21, 2020 [2 favorites]


If I'm watching by myself I only do subtitles for non-English movies. (It bugs me when they do subtitles for people with less cosmopolitan British accents.)

I know enough German and Spanish to get a little distracted when the captions don't match the dialog.

I watched Netflix's Narcos series because I like the genre and as part of my (mostly) off-again/on-again effort to learn Spanish. It's cool seeing (to me) mostly unfamiliar actors in unfamiliar settings.

Wagner Moura is incredible as Pablo Escobar. But apparently his Spanish is terrible. (He's Brazilian and had to learn Spanish for the role.)
posted by kirkaracha at 7:54 PM on February 21, 2020


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