What is your opinion on the thread? Which do you prefer… and why? What do have you against dubbing (and vice versa). 
Depends. Action movies I’d rather have the dubbing as I don’t really consider nuanced acting to be a premium and I don’t want to miss a good explosion because I stopped to read, “aaaaauuugghhhh”. In a drama or comedy, though, I want to hear what the actor sounds like when he’s speaking even if I can’t understand what he’s saying. There’s more to communication than words.
Subtitles all the way. With dubbing, there is no sound ambience, and usually a mismatch between the mouth movements and the dubbed dialogue, which I find far more distracting than having to read the subtitles. Mind, if the original is in a language I think I have some knowledge of, I can drive myself crazy trying to translate back the subtitles and work out what the original dialogue actually was.
Subtitles, because I know how to read.
I prefer subs, by a wide margin. Both as a principal (wanting to experience the media as close to the original, intended way as possible) and because a large percentage of the time dubbing is phoned in, emotionally flat, and done with voices that don’t really fit.
This is an excellent point.
If the movie is largely about visual effects, then let’s keep the picture uncluttered.
If it’s more about what the characters are saying, then I don’t want to miss a word.
I suspect that this will get more traction in Cafe Society than in Great Debates.
Subtitles. Even if you don’t understand the language, there is a lot of information in the tone of the actors voices that is lost with dubbing.
Subtitles, except for animated films.
The main problem I have with subtitles is that I can’t have the movie on in the background, I have to direct all my attention on it. I gave up on watching Outlander because of all the French subtitles. And the thick accents were already a struggle.
Subtitles 100%. The movie is always in the foreground. I basically forget that I’m reading anything. It all goes subconscious-y.
I prefer good dubbing to good subtitles. Both can be bad in a number of ways, and I can’t compare all those to each other.
As a side note subtitles/closed captioning, on English speaking programs ,breaks my little brain and I can’t keep from staring at the words…even foreign languages that I don’t speak or read.
Subtitles. I read quickly and this lets you get the actors’ inflections.
I will admit that the dubbing of the various Studio Ghibli films were nicely done, though. It’s probably easier in animation, where the lip movements aren’t that synchronized in the first place.
Subtitles. The few dubbed movies I’ve sat through never seemed to get the voice right and the dialogue often sounds stilted or a bit off.
I think one of the worst was the version of Mad Max dubbed into American English that I saw on tv one night. I had to change the channel, it was so bad.
Also, with dubs they may put emphasis on attempting to match lip movements even to the detriment of an accurate translation of the dialogue.
Subtitles, without question. Dubbing drives me crazy. I have seen many a dubbed film, since that is the standard for foreign films shown in Russia. But I can’t stand it. I want to hear the actor’s own voice and the original language, even if I don’t know a word of that language. Dubbing pulls me out of the story as well. I become distracted by the obvious mismatch of words and facial expressions, as well as the jarring incongruity of hearing a French policeman or Italian farmer or German scientist speaking Russian.
My husband actually worked for a while on writing scripts for films to be dubbed into Russian. They tried very hard to make the words fit the actors’ lip movements. Not everyone is so conscientious, though. I well remember watching Mexican and American soap operas in Russia that involved a single voice reading the entire script, usually sounding utterly bored. So a passionate love scene was reduced to one guy, speaking both parts without the slightest enthusiasm: “I love you. I love you, too.”
It depends on how well they do either one. For Das Boot, for example, they had the actual German actors all dub in their own voices, including appropriate acting nuances, to it worked well. Lots of older film dubs of yesteryear, were done by erasing pretty much the whole soundtrack, including all the important background sounds, and so it was like watching a weird puppet show.
I got along very well with the subtitled version of Amelie, because, well, theye did a good job of that, too.
I’ve ran across a few dubs like that, too–in the ones I’ve seen, they don’t even mute the original audio, so that instead of replacing the original dialogue with one bored guy talking, it is one bored guy talking over the original dialogue.
Dubbing, because I know how to hear.
Subtitles condense the dialog. Fast-paced, overlapping conversations get reduced to the speed that the average person can read. Plus, reading the subtitles means I miss a lot of what is going on in the rest of the screen.
If you think movies are about reading, maybe the next time they make an adaptation of a book, they should just teleprompter the text of the book for two and a half hours. You can read that.
Which is about three times faster than they can hear.
Really well-done dubbing is fine, especially in animated movies. If it’s not really well-done, though (which it usually isn’t), I’d rather have the subtitles.
The worst, though, is when a movie has both (this was the default on the disk I saw of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). Which would have been OK (not too different from closed captioning on a native-language show), but they used slightly different translations. So I was constantly being distracted by the different word choice or order.
My funniest subtitle story comes from a movie I saw once that was set in Montreal. The main characters were all francophones, and so the English version of the movie had them subtitled. One scene, though, is in a hospital, where the doctors are all speaking English, and so the character in the hospital was speaking English to them… which of course meant that the original video of the movie included French subtitles for benefit of the native francophone audience. And the actress’s accent was so strong that, even with only middle-school French, I actually found it easier to follow by reading the French subtitles than by listening to the English audio.