Good dubbing, or subtitles. But I’m from a dubbing culture, and one where many of the best body actors work as voice actors as well: a lot of the responders are from a “foreign movies is yuck” culture.
Subtitles should preferably be done according to the Spanish subtitling norm, UNE 153010. Those of you with access to British programming may be familiar with this standard as well, since BBC has adopted it in recent years. It calls for:
different colors for different speakers. This has the advantage of making it much easier to track who’s talking, even when the frame does not show it clearly
two-toned letters or a background. This keeps the letters visible when the background is the same color
the use of any recourse the subtitler can think of to make the meaning more clear while keeping the text as short as it needs to be for technical reasons. The norm specifies this can include abbreviations, smileys and unusual punctuation (so, it’s ok to write “no!!!” if the speaker sounds insane)
Having watched material subtitled with that techniqueaccording to that norm and done a bit of subtitling with it, the usual all-white subtitles now seem terribly lazy.
This may be a whoosh, but Das Boot is probably not the example you want to use for “bad” dubbing. Per the wiki, both the German and English dubs were done by the same actors, and most of the native German dialogue had to be dubbed, as the special camera used was too loud in operation to permit direct recording of the actors.
Edit: Oh, and subtitles. Though no help at all is fine on some occasions. One of the neat things about the miniseries Shogun, was that the incomprehensible Japanese language in Parts 1 and 2, through repetition, started to be understandable by Part 5. Enough so, that IIRC, there were long (5-10) minutes parts of Parts 4 and 5 where there was only Japanese spoken, yet I was able to follow along just fine.
Thanks, I wasn’t aware of the unusual nature of how Das Boot was produced, though it doesn’t make the English dubbed version any more watchable for me. It’s probably a bad example for a different reason, though: it came to mind because English is so jarringly incongruous with the whole premise of the movie that I can’t bear to watch it that way. Given the fact that Petersen went to such lengths to achieve authenticity… “‘every screw’ in the set was an authentic facsimile of the kind used in a World War II U-boat” and “Petersen states in his DVD audio commentary that young men from throughout Germany and Austria were recruited for the film, as he wanted faces and dialects that would accurately reflect the diversity of the Third Reich around 1941” I’m genuinely surprised that Petersen would even release an English dubbed version. I suppose it was commercial considerations with the US market in mind.
Anyway in most other cases it’s not the incongruity of English dubbing that’s the problem, but the fact that you’re watching something that has been (usually) crudely altered from the original.
I’ve been watching The Thick of It and, without subtitles, I wouldn’t have a clue what half the Scottish people are saying.
I do agree that it’s also a distraction though and the subtitles often don’t exactly align to what’s being spoken (words dropped, etc) so I can either focus on the subtitles and miss dialogue due to shoddy subbing or focus on the dialogue and miss dialogue due to the accents.
Ah, here come the snobs. Nice how you just skirt insulting posters in this thread.
You are aware that even in closed captioning of English-language productions that the written text doesn’t always match? Sometimes the dialog is just too fast to write it all out and have the audience be able to keep up.
Is the dubbing dialog essentially the same as the subtitles? Is the point of the movie equally conveyed by dubbing as subtitles? If so, who the fuck cares?
The subtitles are likely written by someone other that the screenwirter or a UN-grade translator. Do you know if you’re getting the same dialog as the original language? In the aforementioned* Das Boot,* I watched it one time with both the English language dubbing as well as the subtitles. I was amazed to find that in places they didn’t agree, and in one spot the dubbed and subtitles told a different story! But which was correct? Who knows, because my knowledge of German doesn’t go much past* bratwurst*.
But according to people like you, dub fans are cretins. Film snobs like you should maybe learn the native language. Several decades of deep immersion, so you can grasp all the cultural subtleties, should be sufficient. Because subtitles might not be giving you the total movie the filmmakers intended.
(sometimes) Cretin here: But when you read the dialog, you can miss subtleties of the acting. An expression that turns the dialog on its head. A glance that adds special emphasis to a line. Or some clue happening outside a window that has payback later in the film.
With any foreign film, there are always cultural things that can’t be translated. We can try, but things are always lost. I wish I could speak German, if just for the bar scene in Inglourious Basterds, where not just the words but the accents were important. I’m not sure I got every bit out of that scene, but what ya gonna do?
I’m just saying - both methods have good and bad points. Short of becoming native speakers in a foreign language, we have to deal with the imperfections of either method.
Yup. Had to watch Sexy Beast with the subtitles on. Couldn’t understand a damn thing they were saying, and I come from a Scottish, Irish and English family.
But then again, a good actor can also convey a lot via tone of voice. If I’m watching a movie via subtitles, I can get the content from the subtitles, while still hearing the tone of voice in the original. I can also catch most of the gestures and facial expressions on the screen, because it really doesn’t take very much time to read subtitles. I might miss out on a little this way, but it’s less than what I’m missing out on by losing the original dialog entirely to make room for the dub.
Of course, I also miss out some by virtue of it being a translation (some idioms don’t translate well, and of course jokes are quite difficult), but that would be true no matter how the translation is being conveyed, and if anything subtitles should be better there because you have more room (reading is about three times faster than speech).
There are a few reasons, but the simplest is that reading the subtitles means I miss a lot of action. My foreign movie watching is usually either live-action horror (from around the world; it’s remarkable how much American horror sucks compared to what everyone else is doing) and animated sci-fi (Japanese). Both of these genres depend a lot on watching the action on-screen, but even a more “serious” movie needs me to pay as much attention to things like facial expressions as words. I just can’t do both effectively.
Subtitles are also hard to read in a lot of cases. I am sick of white subtitles on white backgrounds where the words disappear. Even when they pick yellow, it’s not unusual to have scenes with colors that make the subtitles hard to read. You’d get me to do a lot more subtitled movies if you did some kind of letter-boxing so that the subtitles could be displayed below the main image, on a background that is black the whole time.
Subtitling for movies. Really want to hear the actors acting.
Strangely, dubbing for TV. I watch TV differently than movies. Often I’m doing it while doing something else or in a situation with regular interruptions. When I watch subtitled TV this is a common occurrence:
<watching, watching, watching>
<hm…I’d like something to drink>
<walk into the kitchen>
“Oh, I was reading that show, wasn’t I and now I can’t understand it anymore.”
<go back and rewind>
There’s literally only one movie/show in which I prefer a dub over a sub, and it’s Cowboy Bebop. The dubbing on that one was so spectacular that I can’t enjoy the subbed version as much. In fact, I think the dub Faye’s voice actor is much truer to her character than the original japanese actor.
Every other dub I’ve watched is pretty much trash. I think this is for two reasons:
One, they’re attempting to forge a sentence in another language that vaguely matches the lip movements of the characters, when a phrase or word may not be so easily translatable in the same timeframe. So you get hamfisted translations or rushed sentences. A subtitle does not have that problem.
And two, they’re trying to match the tone and delivery of the original. Since I can’t understand the original language I can’t catch all the nuances and tone of voice as well as I can in my own language. When it’s suddenly in my own language every overacted and exaggerated screech and wail becomes immediately apparent as overacted and exaggerated. Even if the original language had those annoying elements and the english actors are just trying to copy them, my unfamiliarity with the original language allows me to gloss it over and minimize it.
Also, I’m just really tired of Johnny Yong Bosch and Yuri Lowenthal being in what seems like every single game or anime. English dubbing needs a lot more variety if it’s going to be any good.
Only cretins deny my grandmother or my brother’s mother in law the right to watch movies not filmed in their own language. Or to any of the people I know who can’t read without using their fingers, or whose eyesight has gone to heck but who aren’t eligible for surgery…
I prefer subtitles. It usually takes much less time to read the dialogue than it takes for them to say it, so I don’t think I miss much. Also, I learn a surprising amount of the language that way, especially if I’m watching a series like the Maigret series with Bruno Cremer, or Montalbano (Italian/Sicilian) or some of those Swedish ones; in cop shows, they tend to repeat some stock phrases quite a bit, so I can catch on after a few times.
When I’m watching Japanese movies, I understand enough of the language to get a lot of the subtext and context that’s missing from the bare dialog (such as noting the level of politeness being used) but my vocabulary is nowhere near good enough to follow the plot except from subtitles. And I don’t know about other languages, but dubbing from Japanese into English just doesn’t work; it seems to take about 50% longer to say something in Japanese as it does in English, and that makes for awkwardly padded sentences. Look at any old Godzilla movie and you’ll see what I mean.
Always excepting (and as already noted several times above) animation. No reason not to dub animation.