I always have the subtitles on, since I want to see if I’m missing any important dialogue. I find quite a bit of my friends do this, too.
Do you?
Yeah. I watch TV with the captions on as well. Most people who visit think it’s weird and ask me to take it off. Losers!
I only turn it off when I’m watch sports. Kind of annoying to watch a game when there’s a big black blob over the action.
I have perfect hearing - it just helps me make sure I catch all of the dialogue. The most important thing I am looking for on my next TV is the kind of captions that are clear instead of the ugly black box.
I only turn the subtitles on if I have trouble making out the dialogue due to strong accents, low sound mix, or, of course, a foreign language. But I leave them off most of the time because I find them unnecessarily distracting. I find myself reading the subtitles even when I can understand perfectly well what is being said, and therefore I may miss out on some of the visual nuances on the screen, such as the actors’ facial expressions
Yes, I do. I sometimes mishear things so I switch the subs on. I take it for granted now to the point that I’m slightly annoyed when a dvd doesn’t include any subtitles (usually TV shows on dvd). What, do those guys charge by the letter or word or something?
On the second viewing of a film with a lot of rapid dialog, I’m likely to turn the subtitles on.
I usually put them on if I’m watching alone. Anyone else tends to get annoyed by it, so I have to keep them off in those situations. My brother shares the same idiosyncrasy, and so he is the only other person I can watch them with. If given a choice between subtitled and dubbed foreign films, I usually opt for the former, and in that case I put my foot down.
Sometimes, if it appears that the rapid (or hard to decipher) dialogue has important plot points, I will even pause the film, ask my family “Did you get all that? I think that was important, lets subtitle it.” It keeps us from getting confused later. Example: This weekend we watched the latest “Pirates of the Caribbean” and there was an important scene with a fortune teller who whispered/hissed her lines in a Carribean accent/sentence structure. Had to subtitle her clues to understand the next few scenes.
I don’t have subtitles on when I watch DVDs alone, but I always turn them on when I watch DVDs with my girlfriend. She has trouble making out dialogue, and I like to have them on so we don’t need to turn the volume up a lot.
I often use subs as a language-learning or reinforcing exercise, so will watch a movie with subs in the same (foreign to me) language:
[ul]
[li]English-language movie (my mother tongue); hardly ever, but I’m a Brit living in the US and have pretty good ears, so dialects don’t usually worry me. [/li][li]French-language movie; I used to live in France so don’t usually need subs, but will sometimes turn on the French subs in a slang-filled movie to give added clues for my comprehension, and to help my vocabulary and spelling.[/li][li]Spanish-language movie; if the dialog’s fairly straightforward I’ll watch with Spanish subtitles, else English. Sometimes I’ll watch important scenes with English subs then again with Spanish subs to get the maximum out of the scene.[/li][li]movies in other languages; English subs, of course, as the OP says.[/li][/ul]
May I just sign below Tangent and Antonius Block’s posts? In my case the native language is Spanish, but other than that, same same.
Same here.
I do frequently watch telly with the sound muted. I’ll be listening to music and maybe pottering around on the internet or browsing through a magazine at the same time. Just seeing the screen out of the corner of my eye is enough for me to follow the action, with the odd bit of attention paid to the subtitles to catch the dialogue.
I find the subtitles on English-language films or TV show DVDs are often incomplete or missing a lot of the nuances of the scene (the Season One Futurama DVD subtitling bears almost no relation to what’s being said on screen in many episodes).
I only use DVD subtitling for foreign-language movies, FWIW.
I have a slight hijack if you don’t mind. I turn on English subtitles to get something I missed. When I turn them of signs will still be subtitled in French, but not dialogue, even when subtitles are turned off. Any ideas what this could be?
If I’m playing DVDs on the second-hand player, I use subtitles because the thing’s volume is shot. Only goes up to halfway, and that’s still too low. (Friend of mine says he knows a fix, though, so I live in hope.) Playing them on the laptop, I don’t have a problem, so no subtitles
I do it if there actually ARE English DVD subtitles. Seem to be finding more and more box sets without them these days 
Those aren’t “subtitles” as in, “a substitute for heard dialogue”, they’re translations. If what a sign says is important enough to the story, it will get a translation. Normally when a movie shows, for example, the spine of a book so close it fills the whole screen, it means there’s some connexion between the book itself and the rest of the story; it’s not just “a random book someone was reading”.
Almost always, and then always in the language that is spoken in the film, provided I speak that language.
A couple years ago we bought a Sharp Aquos TV, and we love it for the subtitles (among other things). You can choose the font size, style and color, as well as the background. We almost never use the DVD subtitles because they are so intrusive and, well, loud.
Ditto. Really annoying when you go to setup and, well, there is no setup.
I don’t find subtitles intrusive and sometimes they really come in handy.
I always watch DVDs with subtitles or captions for the hearing-impaired, however Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon posed a problem for me. Whoever translated the English dubbing from Mandarin did not translate the English subtitles, thus one hears (hypothetical example) “Meet me at the mountaintop,” while reading “We will rendezvous at the summit.” This was fascinating at first, but it quickly became a distraction.
Subtitles are absolutely essential when listening to commentary, because the commentators’ voices always drown out the dialogue.
Number me among those who find an inadequate set-up very upsetting.