I always turn on the DVD subtitles, and I always have captions on when watching TV. I find it very annoying when subtitles aren’t available.
I watch a lot of British shows, and captions are especially useful there. I love Sean Bean, for example, but I can’t understand a bloody word he says.
On TV, sometimes you can catch where they have changed the dialogue and neglected to update the captions. I remember on The X-Files the captions would sometimes show long voice-overs that had been cut from the audio.
I use them whenever I’m watching by myself, and I’ll ask ahead of time if anyone watching the movie with me would mind if I turned on subtitles. If I’ve seen the movie before I’ll probably leave them off. For certain movies where the dialog is very clear and the movie is very visual in nature, I’ll leave them off.
If the movie is rented from Netflix and I’m pretty sure I won’t buy the movie or watch it more than once, I’ll definitely use subtitles. I think the clarity of dialog (and consequently plot, sometimes) makes up for any visual distractions.
I use them sometimes on English-language movies, sometimes because of the UK accents. But I’ve found that sometimes background dialog that I can’t make out sometimes gets subtitled, as well as song titles, which can be useful.
What you said. Plus, it can kill the comedy or the drama if I know (from reading the subtitles) what the actors are going to say before they actually deliver the lines.
I don’t usually, unless I’m watching late at night and have to have the volume so low that I can’t hear the dialogue. And I sometimes back up and turn on the captions or subtitles to catch something I couldn’t quite hear or understand.
The one movie I can recall that caused me to turn the subtitles on and leave them on was Titus. Shakespearean English is so much easier to follow when you read it rather than hear it.
This also happened on the US version of the first Harry Potter movie. My mother was watching it in “Spanish”, with “Spanish” subtitles on, and the dialogue and captions were completely different - well, the same ideas, but totally different vocabulary, like you said. The captions were in Mexican-Spanish, and the dialogue was in Spain-Spanish.
This also works well when viewing the Kenneth Brannaugh version (as opposed to the Mel Gibson version, which I’ve never seen but heard is crap) of Hamlet. Once you’ve viewed it two-three times, though, subtitles are optional.
I rarely use subtitles when viewing a movie, and mostly when the movie is not in English. On the rare occasion that I do use them on an English film, it’s because it’s Shakespearean English or the dialect is so befuddled by background noise or an accent that I’m unfamiliar with that it is rendered unintelligible. I have to admit, however, that I wish there were subtitles on King of the Hill when Boomhauer talks. It took me until recently to realize that he is actually saying intelligible things, just at a breakneck speed mumble with a heavy accent thrown in.
The only time I watch subtitles on a DVD is if it’s something like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or (as someone else said) Billy Elliot. Movies about “poor” (fiscally speaking) English people with … poor English people accents.
My TV, though, always has subtitles. When I was in college I kept it in the closet in the dorm room, which was too close to my neighbors’ room for my comfort. So I started watching TV with very very low sound and subtitles. When I moved back in with my folks I felt my TV was too close to their room so I did the same thing.
Now I live alone and my first week in the house I turned the TV up as far as it could go, just for kicks. Didn’t like it So now I still use subtitles. They are handy.
I especially like being able to report stuff in the Lost threads as if I know something special because I watch subtitles.
A distant cousin to this, I have noticed, is that subtitles will often give the lyrics to music playing. The music more often than not is dead on for action in the moment, or action comming up.
In general, whenever possible I always have the subtitles on. I never gave it second thought. I would argue that I put them on not to miss anything. I put the subtitles on with a DVD with the family, and they reference my loss of hearing in my left ear. After that, they asked to take the subtitles off. I did so.
And moments later, they are asking each other what someone in the movie said.
Before I got married, I always watched TV with the captions and DVDs with the subtitles. It bugs my husband though, so I don’t get to do it anymore.
One fun thing I used to enjoy was running either the foreign dubs or subtitles of Buffy episodes. I know the episodes well enough that I really don’t need the English anymore, and I enjoy seeing/hearing how they translate some of the phrases in such idiom-heavy dialogue.
I only do it when I’m having trouble understanding the dialogue because of accents or background noise. Also, if it’s a movie where the sound is badly done - lots of quiet dialogue mixed with lots of loud explosions and car chases - I’ll keep the volume quite low because I can’t stand the loud parts, and I need subtitles to help me catch all the quiet parts. For me, it’s easier than grabbing for the remote all the time to adjust the sound up and down.
I don’t really like it, though, because as others have mentioned, I’ll sometimes read the dialogue before people say it, which is distracting. And I find myself reading subtitles even when I don’t need to, because they’re there, and so I’ll miss action in the movie. Not to mention the fact when the dialogue is fast and complicated, the subtitles will often condense it a little, and you don’t get the full meaning.
So now I still use subtitles. They are handy.