Both are poor substitutes, but if you have to choose one, it’s subtitles, because the dubbing never manages to convey the right emotion.
But subtitles are also annoying when you can’t turn them off (i.e. at a theater) because when they get it wrong, or leave out important parts of what was said (because reading takes longer and takes up more screen space so the subtitlers often fudge it) you can’t help noticing and thereby being pulled out of the scene.
What you describe as melding is a special case of the Translation Convention, not the whole of its scope - more often, the story’s just in English-That’s-Really-A-Foreign-Tongue (or Japanese-TRAFT for the anime examples) from the start.
Mostly subs but, like Tengu mentioned above, a film like Godzilla might be an exception. The famously bad dubbing of early Japanese monster movies is part of the fun.
Also, I’m happy to watch animated films in translation. The mouth movements in them aren’t so precise that dubbing hurts, as long as the translator and voice actors aren’t hacks.
I want to hear the actor’s original voice, period. So subtitling all the way, even when it’s crappy.
Do you know if the animations, etc. were removed from the blu-ray release? I did start out watching it on DVD with subtitles, because I’d heard of the special effects. I saw a few, but eventually found I couldn’t keep up with both the subs and the real special effects, so I turned them off.
When I recently watched it on blu-ray, I found a commentary track by Sergei Lukyanenko, the author of the original novel, so watched it with that and subtitles, if I recall. The subtitles were just normal.
Always subtitles, but I prefer translated Miyazaki and other Studio Ghibli movies.
They usually do a really good job on the translation and new voice acting.
I like subtitles because I like the sound of other languages. Dubbing drives me crazy.
I often multitask while the tv is on, reading, perusing mailorder catalogs (yes the paper ones), xword puzzles, etc., so prefer to hear English dialogue vs. having to read subtitles.
In order of preference (assuming its a movie that’s almost entirely in English but that has some characters speaking their native tongue):
Dubbing would seem stupid in the above stated case.
Now, the all-time stupidest way of dealing with foreign languages was in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Picture it: Italian army conquers and occupies Greek village. Nicholas Cage is an Italian officer who speaks Greek and is acting as an interpreter between his superiors and the townspeople.
He talks to his Italian comrades in English, then goes over to the Greek villagers and talks to them, also in English but with a shitty Italian accent. They answer in English. He walks back to his Italian comrades and “translates” what they said in English… to English with a different accent.
depends on the dub. i usually cut the subtitles on and listen to the dub. if the dub is at least close to what the subs say i’ll watch it dubbed, unless i can tell the subs are wrong too. you would be surprised how often even major plot points can change between the two.
Definitely subtitles, particularly when watching anime. A big part of the reason is that Japanese animation uses different visual techniques and body language/gesture conventions than American animation, and for me there is a distracting disconnect between watching the Japanese visual conventions while listening to the dialogue being spoken in American speech patterns. There’s also a difference in the general “wordiness” of the two languages, in that Japanese (what I’ve seen of it, YMMV) tends to use many more words than English uses to say the same thing*, so when English-dubbed anime is trying to keep the spoken English words synched as closely as possible to the characters’ mouth movements, it can result in an awkward cadence.
*I’ve specifically noticed this when looking at English translations of Japanese songs - a sung phrase that takes 15-20 words in Japanese gets translated to an English sentence of 10 words or fewer.
On animes I generally prefer dubs. Though the change in voice actors in my favorite series Ranma 1/2 caused me to give up on dubbed and go to subtitles. I just couldn’t take the change in voice that resulted.
On regular films a prefer subtitles. I find watching dubbed movies difficult.
If it’s a film made by English speaking actors I have no issue with them speaking English even if they should be speaking a foreign language. I’ve watched enough SciFi that I can easily suspend belief enough everyone and everything speaking English doesn’t phase me.
Make it Spain instead of Germany, and I’m in the same situation.
Euskal Telebista is the public television of Euskadi, a Spanish region that’s bilingual Basque/Spanish. ETB1 is in Basque, ETB2 in Spanish. There’s a comedy show in ETB2, Vaya Semanita (What a Week!), that’s been very succesful and got syndicated out to national channels: the syndicated version shows subtitles whenever the characters use a word that’s Basque or local slang. It’s kind of interesting checking out which Spanish words get subtitled on grounds of “you guys Up North all know what this means, but people Down South sure don’t.”
I’m not sure what you mean, but if it’s an American film set in France, I’d expect the actors to be speaking English.
Sorry, Chuck for my confusing post, but let me try again;
But what if there were a bunch of other actors who actually were Russian, would you prefer…
Oh, crap. No wonder you’re confused as to what I meant!
The whole FILM would have to be Russian in order for my poll to make sense! And that third option is what makes the whole thing non-sensical! If they speak ONLY Russian, then there would be no REASON for that phasing into English.
Shit, please close this thing and I apologize for wasting everyone’s time.
Those numbered things up there? THAT’S how I think now, “If this happens, then that will follow…”
Shit, sorry y’all
Q
I know a little Japanese, and I think that’s true. Two reasons:
(1) Japanese uses particles which often are not translated as separate words in English. An extreme example “watashi-tachi no”, where “watashi” means “I”, “tachi” is used to form the plural of nouns for people, and “no” is a particle denoting possession, translates into English as “our”.
(2) Japanese has a limited number of syllables that can be used to form words, so typically a Japanese word has more syllables than an English word, even when it is a direct borrow from English.
And I prefer subtitles to dubbing, regardless of how much I know of the language.
Subtitles, I hate dubbing. I’m not snobbish about it, but with dubbing all I can focus on is that the dialogue doesn’t match what is coming out of their mouth. Bad ADR bugs me as well for that same reason.
Subtitles. Though I liked the way the “melding” was handled in the first section of Inglourious Basterds.
I prefer subtitles.
I don’t speak much Spanish but sometimes I can tell the difference between what is translated to the subtitles and what was actually spoken and I find it highly amusing.
I just remembered a Hong Kong movie I watched a while back, and while subtitles were an option, I chose for some reason to select “dubbed” instead. And in this particular case, the dubbing job was outstanding - you almost couldn’t tell it was dubbed because everything matched up so perfectly. It was almost as if they’d shot every scene in both Mandarin and English.
(I really wish I could remember the name of the movie, because I’d like to see more films with the same actresses. It was a somewhat bizarre, but very funny, martial arts/vampire comedy featuring two young actresses who apparently have done quite a few movies together, and featured Jackie Chan as a “guest star”. I’ve tried to find it again at my local Hastings, but unfortunately and to my never-ending aggravation, Hastings chooses to sort their foreign films alphabetically by their English titles, rather than dividing them up by country of origin. So to locate a specific movie when I can remember neither the title nor the names of the actors, I’d have to start with the “A’s” and go though everything until I spotted something that looks familiar.)