They made a good joke with subtitles in the comedy Not Another Teen Movie. Or this video.
I watch everything with subtitles. For one thing, I watch a ton of British telly. I’m pretty good at understanding RP, but take for example - we’re watching Doc Martin, and most of the people in that show, other than the Doc himself, don’t speak in RP. They speak in their Cornwall accent. I’m not as good at translating that, so I like the subtitles on. Then I watch Doctor Who, and I watch Sherlock, and all of these have different types of English accents. And then that’s not even counting when you are supposed to hear the dialogues or one-liners over the explosions or whatever background noise there is in the movie.
You can pry my subtitles from my cold, dead hands.
I kind of understand this. There are a lot of shows that I watch without giving my full attention to. It’s a little jarring to suddenly hear words that I can’t understand, look at the screen, and realize that I’ve missed the last two or three lines of dialogue and I have no idea what’s happening. So yeah, I’d rather not have subtitles in shows I watch for idle entertainment.
Otherwise, I’ll happily give my full attention to a subtitled foreign film, or a really great TV show that happens to use a lot of subtitles. Just not when I’m flopped on the couch after a long day, browsing the internet while watching some bit of entertainment on the TV.
Yes! And on the same note, why do the subtitles of an upscaled DVD have to look that ugly on a Blu-Ray player? Can’t you render the font in nice, crisp Full HD, like on a proper Blu-Ray? Isn’t the subtitle just a time-coded text file on the disc?
Oh, don’t get me started. The proper response to this is more of a blog post than a message board post. I chaired the standards subcommittee that created EIA-708, which is the specification for closed captions on digital television. It includes the ability to change the size of the captions (we called it a “caption volume control”), and for viewers to override the caption position specified by the captioner. It also includes edged characters, a wide spectrum of foreground and background colors, multiple typefaces, and a whole lot more. The bottom line is that TV manufacturers didn’t want to spend the money to build some of the advanced features into their sets, and broadcasters don’t want to spend the money to use the required features, because it takes longer for the captioners/subtitlers to create fancy well-designed text. Grrrrr.
Actually, the subtitles on a DVD (unlike other formats) consist of a series of graphic overlay files with a VERY limited color space and mediocre (at best) resolution.
I find this to be a plus, because it encourages you to pay attention to the movie instead of everything around you. Movies are much more enjoyable if you shut everything else out for 1.5 - 2 hours and just watch straight through.
It’s interesting you use this example because this was one film where I found the subtitles very distracting–because a lot of the film constitutes spelling, so it was very distracting to hear the French word being spelled one letter at a time, only to have the English subtitles spell out a completely different set of letters.
Though the reason was understandable, the effect was still that what you heard and what you saw was so obviously at odds with each other, that it pulled me out of the movie a bit (though it was still a wonderful movie and subtitling still the only reasonable option).
I don’t mind subtitles occasionally - but have to admit I am not a huge fan of an entire film in subtitles.
One sort of funny example was when I had to review a French film that was really heavy on dialog…I mean these people were really chatty and speaking a mile a minute. OK, fair enough - but the subtitles were in German. So, while I do speak German, reading those subtitles at about 200 words per second was a challenge. I don’t think I was able to even see the actors on the film, let alone see what they were doing, as I was too busy trying to read all of the text zipping by.
I do like that they now do subtitles in yellow - makes it easier to read than when they are in white font that sometimes disappears, depending on the background.
I don’t like subtitles, but I’m certainly not angry about them. The reason I dislike them is simply because it interferes with my immersion in the film. Sure, sometimes it may help pick up a work I might otherwise miss, but that’s how real life is too. I do like them in situations where immersion isn’t an option, like when there’s other noise or I’m not able to pay full attention, or if it makes sense when dealing with multiple languages being spoken to help me keep in mind that not everyone present in the scene understand what is being said. But otherwise, they jar me out of film each time they show up.
Subtitles don’t bother me, within a few minutes I seem to be able to read them without even really looking at them so I am still taking in the movie. For the most part I can watch shows and movies from England with no difficulty in understanding at all. The exception seems to be the crime movies like Snatch, Lock Stock and 2 Smoking Barrels, and Layer Cake. All outstanding movies but movies where the English the characters are speaking is definitely not English on any planet I’ve ever lived on. What dialect is that?
What a terrible decision! They should have had the English subtitles give the French spelling!
Have you ever actually been to England? Because those movies have, in addition to Irish and Scottish characters, accents from all over GB. Going to the northern or eastern part of the island in particular will present lots of regional dialects that some Yanks would consider undecipherable (though you get used to them after a while).
What’s great about the subtitlers here is that they translate everything, including stuff in foreign languages that weren’t subtitled in the original. Stuff like the Latin in the scene from the West Wing, or - awesomely - all of the Chinese in *Firefly *(which, apparently, was a very foul-mouthed show).
Yeah. It’s like they don’t understand the actual point of subtitles. Dubs are where you change things to fit the scene. Subs are where you keep things as close to the original as possible, something that can’t be done in dubs due to time constraints. Nearly everyone I know who prefers subs cites their accuracy as one of the reasons. (I’m surprised it hasn’t come up as much in this thread.)
I don’t quite dislike subs, and they are better than no translation at all, but a good dub almost always means I can enjoy something more on a first viewing. Hearing the actors performance in another language and then correlating that to the text on the screen is not as easy as just hearing them together. Plus, oft times, the different practices of different languages make it difficult to correlate. An excited Japanese person, for example, just doesn’t sound like an excited American. (Often they sound much more aggressive than intended. And, no, I don’t mean in anime.)
Excellent point. A few times, when I’ve tried watching something (in English) with the closed-captioning on, I found it detracted too much from my enjoyment for pretty much this reason. It’s especially bad with comedies, where timing is important.
Interestingly, here in the UK at least, in recent years there have been a lot of European police/political dramas that find their way on to our screen. Wallander/Borgen/The Killing/The Bridge etc.
All very good and yet not once have I heard a criticism of the subtitles. They don’t seem to be a barrier to enjoyment at all.
I love subtitles. It’s always interesting when little background scenes are subtitled past the point where you can actually hear the dialogue. I put them on for everything I watch that have them. I hate when I have to rewind a scene five times to make out what line was. At this point I’m just so used to them it’s weird for me when a dvd doesn’t include them.
I don’t get all these people talking about them being distracting or missing stuff on the screen while reading them. Am I really the only person capable of taking in the entire screen, and reading them while I’m watching the action? I didn’t think it was a special skill, but judging by the way everyone talks maybe I should rethink that assessment…
When I watch downloaded English movies with a girl friend , I get dutch subtiles from the Internet, they are made by volunteers , some of them put a lot effort into them, like adding pop culture or local product notes…
If what bienville said way back in Post #3 is correct—and I think it is—reading subtitles is a special skill.
My wife loves to recount the story of watching some TV show about the British Royals with my older sisters. They were vehement about not having the CC on, as it bugged them to no end. Thus free from the distraction of the subtitles, they spent half the time watching the show saying “what did he say?” – “what was that” – “did you catch what she said” etc. How it did not bug them worse to miss half the dialogue and end up talking through the show is beyond me.