# Dubbing or Subtitles? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [July 28, 2017, 8:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313 "2017-07-28T08:44:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Gatopescado](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gatopescado/32/5711_2.png) [@Gatopescado](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gatopescado)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2017, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313/21 "2017-07-28T16:08:14Z")
You know what drives me nuts? When I’m watching a documentary, and they will have a translator telling you what the guy on screen is saying, but they feel the need to do it in such a heavy accent, you can’t understand it any better than the guy speaking the foreign language! Yeah, I get it that the guy is Japanese. I can see him. And this is a program about Japan in WW2. There is no need for that! Either put in subtitles, or translate in plain, perfect English so I can understand! It’s not like this is Live TV. ---
**Author:** ![Rysto](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ecccb3/32.png) [@Rysto](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rysto)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2017, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313/22 "2017-07-28T16:21:46Z")
I prefer a well-done dub to well-done subtitling, but there are a lot of poor dubs out there. If I had to choose between only dubs or only dubs for the rest of my life, I’d go with subs-only as the average quality is **much** higher\*. - Sadly, as I recently discovered, even on legitimate paid streaming sites, the quality isn’t uniformly high, but that’s a rant for another day. ---
**Author:** ![Two\_Many\_Cats](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8dc957/32.png) [@Two\_Many\_Cats](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Two_Many_Cats)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2017, 5:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313/23 "2017-07-28T17:47:28Z")
Subtitles, first, last, and always. And for cryin’ out loud print those titles in intense yellow font! The white ones always disappear against concrete, light clothes, cloudy skies. ---
**Author:** ![Santelia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/eb9ed0/32.png) [@Santelia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Santelia)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2017, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313/24 "2017-07-28T18:20:33Z")
Generally subtitles except for animation, where it’s dubbed to begin with so I may as well understand it. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2017, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313/25 "2017-07-28T18:20:53Z")
> [@Two\_Many\_Cats](#): > > And for cryin’ out loud print those titles in intense yellow font! The white ones always disappear against concrete, light clothes, cloudy skies. White with a significant black outline (or vice-versa.) ---
**Author:** ![Hampshire](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hampshire/32/4887_2.png) [@Hampshire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hampshire)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2017, 8:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313/26 "2017-07-28T20:42:50Z")
I first saw _Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon_ with subtitles and loved the sound of the Mandarin language, the actors voices, and the emotion coming through the actors voices. Tried watching it with dubbing and it ruined the whole experience IMHO. ---
**Author:** ![DrCube](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a3d4f5/32.png) [@DrCube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrCube)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2017, 8:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313/27 "2017-07-28T20:59:51Z")
_Almost_ always subtitles. But, some of [my favorite movies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollars_Trilogy) were dubbed. This was because the actors all spoke their own languages during filming, and there _was_ no “original language”. Sometimes, actors speaking to each other in the same scene couldn’t actually understand what the other one said. [From Wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_Western): > [@](#): > > These movies were originally released in Italian, but as most of the films featured multilingual casts and sound was post-synched, most “western all’italiana” do not have an official dominant language. The typical Spaghetti Western team was made up of an Italian director, Italo-Spanish technical staff, and a cast of Italian, Spanish, German, and American actors, sometimes a fading Hollywood star and sometimes a rising one like the young Clint Eastwood in three of Sergio Leone’s films. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2017, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313/28 "2017-07-28T21:03:43Z")
Subtitles. ---
**Author:** ![DCnDC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dcndc/32/2842_2.png) [@DCnDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DCnDC)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2017, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313/29 "2017-07-28T21:14:07Z")
Subtitles. The inherent visual disconnect between mouths and words with dubbing is more bothersome to me than subtitles. ---
**Author:** ![caligulathegod](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/caligulathegod/32/9685_2.png) [@caligulathegod](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/caligulathegod)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2017, 9:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313/30 "2017-07-28T21:23:09Z")
Depends on the film. I despise the English dub on Cinema Paradiso, although the main supporting character is actually dubbed in both English and Italian (Alfredo, the projectionist spoke German on set). For Spaghetti Westerns and Italian Horror, I prefer the English dub. They always filmed those silent and dubbed in all dialog after. Most of the time, the cast aren’t even speaking the real dialog and the script is written later. My favorite, Suspiria, has the main characters dubbing their own lines in English, so it’s probably more accurate to call it the default. They found an Italian print in a storage bin of an old theater and are touring it around the country, so I’ll see it in Italian for the first time after seeing it in English over 100 times. ---
**Author:** ![thelurkinghorror](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7c8e57/32.png) [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2017, 9:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313/31 "2017-07-28T21:41:21Z")
Subtitles 99%. There is a small number of films that either do subtitles poorly (miss meaning), or are too big or annoying. Also as mentioned, some like Ghibli are dubbed well so I don’t have a strong bias. I don’t find subtitles distracting in other cases, and keep them on when watching English language media alone. And of course, bad dubbing has its own merits in things like Godzilla. ---
**Author:** ![D\_Odds](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/d_odds/32/2882_2.png) [@D\_Odds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/D_Odds)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2017, 10:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313/32 "2017-07-28T22:10:16Z")
Dubbing 100%. I so so rarely just watch TV. I’m cooking, cleaning, working, etc and reading the screen is out of the question. There are only a handful of shows where I sit down and only watch the show. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2017, 11:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313/33 "2017-07-28T23:03:39Z")
> [@Just\_Asking\_Questions](#): > > 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. See, with me it’s the exact opposite - if I don’t have subtitles or captioning on, I spend so much of my attention on trying to follow what people are saying, I often can’t focus on the action. And no, my hearing is fine. I guess I’m just better at absorbing visual information. ---
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2017, 11:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313/34 "2017-07-28T23:37:08Z")
I prefer dubbing for films with a lot of foreign dialog. I find it annoying to spend the entire movie reading subtitles. Subtitles are ok for very small parts. A few minutes of dialog in the entire movie. I watched The Equalizer movie a couple nights ago and the criminal characters spoke Russian. The movie is set in a US city and I feel the foreign language is a needless gimmick. Oh look! We cast real Russians in these parts. I gritted my teeth and put up with the subtitles. ---
**Author:** ![Doug\_K](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b5ac83/32.png) [@Doug\_K](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doug_K)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2017, 11:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313/35 "2017-07-28T23:50:59Z")
> [@GuanoLad](#): > > 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. I consider this to be a plus. You cannot fully appreciate a film without giving it your undivided attention. This helps avoid the temptation to task switch. > [@Santelia](#): > > Generally subtitles except for animation, where it’s dubbed to begin with so I may as well understand it. Not really. The voices are normally recorded first and the film is animated to match the voices. With dubbing the voice actors vainly attempt to match their voices to the mouth movements of the original actors or animation. It doesn’t take very many subtitled movies under your belt before it becomes second nature, and you don’t even notice that you’re reading. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2017, 11:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313/36 "2017-07-28T23:52:41Z")
> [@Doug\_K](#): > > Not really. The voices are normally recorded first and the film is animated to match the voices. With dubbing the voice actors vainly attempt to match their voices to the mouth movements of the original actors or animation. That’s the case with Western animation - I think that with anime, they generally animate first, then record. ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2017, 11:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313/37 "2017-07-28T23:56:21Z")
Subtitles 100%. If you watch a dub you’re watching a different movie, and if I wanted to watch a different movie I’d watch the awful remake. And I’m not kidding about it being a different movie - even with dubbing that’s highly acclaimed for its accuracy and quality, you watch the special features and hear the dub voice actors talk about making the character their own - modifying it to put their stamp on the work, and to feel like they’re being creative. ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2017, 12:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313/38 "2017-07-29T00:02:38Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > That’s the case with Western animation - I think that with anime, they generally animate first, then record. There are exceptions (Akira being a famous one), but in general you’re correct. Though nowadays I’ve noticed an increase in synchronization between mouth movements and the japanese speech - it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they’ve been recording to an unfinished version of it, and then went in and tweaked the frames and mouth positions to more closely match the speech afterwards. The real kicker to anime is that when they dub it, they tend to try really really hard to match the mouth movements. Besides the fact that things take different amounts of time to say in english and japanese so they have to rewrite the script to fit (usually adding extra words), they also try to fit mouthflaps that the japanese ignored! So if the character is just opening and closing their mouth randomly, the japanese will simply talk, and the english will strain to fit. ---
**Author:** ![CairoCarol](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cairocarol/32/3825_2.png) [@CairoCarol](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CairoCarol)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2017, 12:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313/39 "2017-07-29T00:17:10Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > 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. I vote subtitles. However, they can be distracting if you know both the language being spoken and the language of the subtitles. I have watched quite a few movies and TV shows in English with Indonesian subtitles, and invariably spend all my time using the experience as a tool to improve my Indonesian rather than pay attention to the show - not to mention second-guessing the subtitles, which are often slightly wrong. The most delightfully wrong case of subtitling came during an episode of the TV show “Numbers.” The FBI agent Don was, as usual, getting help from his math prodigy brother Charlie. In this episode, solving the case depended on understanding the thinking of a criminal who was also a math prodigy. So the original dialog went something like this: **Charlie** : This guy [the criminal] is really smart! \*\*Don: \*\*_Your_ kind of smart. Don, of course was drawing a parallel between the kind of intelligence exhibited by the criminal and Charlie’s kind of intelligence. But the subtitle in Indonesia, translated back into English, was “You are somewhat intelligent.” It missed the point completely, but was a perfectly reasonable translation of “You’re kind of smart.” ---
**Author:** ![D\_Odds](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/d_odds/32/2882_2.png) [@D\_Odds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/D_Odds)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2017, 1:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313/40 "2017-07-29T01:06:17Z")
> [@Doug\_K](#): > > I consider this to be a plus. You cannot fully appreciate a film without giving it your undivided attention. This helps avoid the temptation to task switch. Yes we can. We can enjoy the work as much as we, the viewer, the consumer, wants. If you enjoy something more by giving it your full attention, that is your prerogative. Doesn’t mean it is the one true way. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dubbing-or-subtitles/792313.md?page=3)