Subtitles, of course. I won’t watch anything dubbed. Dubbing is the audio equivalent of watching a movie through a snapchat animal filter.
I’ve been watching subtitled movies from about 30 years, most of them in English which I also speak, and I have never found an example of dialog being condensed to fit.
Really? It’s quite common to abbreviate the dialog to fit the reading speed of watchers. I honestly can’t think of a single movie I’ve watched where I knew both the spoken and translated language where this did not happen.
You didn’t have a category for “If I start watching, say, Princess Mononoke, and decide it’s worth seeing, I’ll pause the movie, move to Tokyo, enroll in a class at the University of Tsukuba-Tokyo called ‘Japanese for American Ex-Pats’, attend every class for two semesters and do all the homework which includes meeting with my kenkyū gurūpu (geographically-determined study group), attend graduation and receive my Tsukuba Certificate in Modern Japanese, fly home and unpause the movie.”
I wouldn’t go anywhere near that far, but I do feel that this subject tends to attract those who take their TV/movie watching far more seriously than I do. Understandable, as I’ll get the same way on other subjects. I simply choose to not make that same time and attention commitment to watch a subtitled-only foreign language show because it is not that important to me. But I am sure that there are things that are important to me that I do make the time commitment for that others choose not to.
But some do handle the subject quite snobbishly.
Any animated film is already dubbed, in a sense: the drawings you see on the screen are not who’s actually speaking. So I don’t see anything wrong with a (good!) dub of an animated film.
Subtitles, but be careful. I watch with subtitles, often British TV. The subtitles are often inaccurate, or condensed. The use of “[inaudible]” is common. (It wasn’t inaudible, she said “Aberystwyth” you deaf nitwit.) Anime is bearable, but after a while you can hear the speaker using one word and it is being translated as another. This is particularly bad with names which can be honorifics, ranks, nicknames, first or last names but which can be translated as “you” or “he”. The worst is the dreaded “dub-titles”, where you get the English transcription of the dub. OTOH, a literal translation of what was said is often headache inducing what with a lack of third person tense or some similar issue. So, you get a mixed bag.
Subtitles for live action. Dubbing for animation.
i picked depends on the movie/show
if its supposed ot be funny esp for anime i mean dominion tank police isnt as funny with subs…
But it all depends on the cast tho
Original language, with subtitles. Always. I don’t think I’m a snob for respecting directors and actors. How are people who don’t know or care what foreign-language actors sound like not being English-language snobs?
People in other countries where dubbing is the norm live their whole lives having never heard the voices of, to choose some classic actors, Katherine Hepburn, Kathleen Turner, Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, Jean Arthur and so many others, because their voices have been erased.
I personally want to hear the real voices of, just to name a few, people like Toshirô Mifune, Catherine Deneuve, Klaus Kinski, Marion Cotillard, Audrey Tautou, Amitabh Bachchan, Akshay Kumar, Tabu, and, well, everyone in a movie where they’re not speaking English.
I voted “Subs Not Dubs”, but then realised I make an exception specifically for later Miyazaki films (Princess Mononoke onwards) so I guess I’m “depends on the movie” but that’s the only set of movies I make an exception for.
It might be because in 70s/80s South Africa, dubbing into Afrikaans and sometimes African languages was routine - I grew up on Alpha:1999 (Space:1999), Blitspatrollie (The Sweeney), Redding Internationaal(Thunderbirds), *Misdaad in Miami *(Miami Vice), Steve Austin: Die Man van Staal (6 Million Dollar Man) and Rabobi!( Xhosa animated Spiderman. His themesong went something like this).
I fucking hated it all.
Unless it’s an old Japanese monster movie, I prefer subtitles. Bad dubbing is part of the kaiju charm.
Live action: Original language with subs.
Animation: Dubs.
A few days ago, I sent back a Netflix disk after watching only a few minutes, because everyone was talking Cockney and there were no subtitles.
Back in the early nineties, I saw and loved a film called Riff-Raff, that was technically in English but subtitled. For the British audience as well as American, because not only were the regional accents thick as bricks, there was such a mix of them! Cockney **and ** Glaswegian **and ** Suffolk and Welsh…In the theater and on VHS, it had bright yellow subtitles that the director (Ken Loach) had overseen. But when it came out on DVD…no subtitles. Not even generic ones. Oi!
Technically speaking, those aren’t subtitles, that’s closed captioning.
I usually get them off torrents. That means original-language audio that I don’t really understand, subbed with titles in some third language that I definitely don’t understand.
If I’m actually going to sit there and pay it my full attention, original language. However, in general I am doing something else when watching something so would like the ease of audio language. Subtitles are a must either way though.
Indeed!
Woody Allen understood this.
Live action, I’ll watch with subtitles. For anime, I’ll watch it dubbed. (Most anime is “dubbed” even in Japanese, as the animation is completed before dialog is recorded.)
Dubbed. If I keep having to read at the bottom, I miss a lot of the non-dialog nuance.