Yehhhhhh, depending. The US has about 6-1/2 times as many people as Spain, and I can understand Spain showing lots of dubbed movies. But for me there is one Spanish dubber that I seem to hear in EVERY FLAMIN’ DUBBED MOVIE. It’s like a drinking game, how far will we get into the movie before we hear the voice of María Luisa Solá. Hopefully that 3:56 clip will not send you around the bend before you watch enough dubbed movies and TV shows in Spain. The dubbing in Spain is actually pretty good, at least for the dubbers starting/stopping to speak at the same time as their on-screen counterparts. But I seem to hear the same ten voices over and over again, no matter what the movie or genre. Spaniards, please speak up and help out María Luisa Solá and her cohorts.
Same in Thailand. There seems to be a limited pool of dubbers in the Thai dubbing industry. Watchers of Thai TV will hear the same few voices over and over and over again.
Subs, it just feels wrong watching anime and hearing English. The one exception there is Yu Yu Hakusho were the dubbing studio got enormously creative and used many different accents ie Irish, Australian etc And upped the snark level of a couple characters 
As to myself, it depends. If I speak the language, I watch the movie “as is”, without subtitles. Otherwise, I will choose dubbing or subtitling depending on several factors. Animated movies? Almost always dubbed (as somebody said earlier, animated movies are already dubbed to begin with, so…). Movies translated for a certain market? Well, I will take into account the way things are done in that market. If it is a movie that has been dubbed in Spain, I will give the dubbing a chance. Spanish dubbing tends to be of excellent quality. If it has been prepared for the Russian market, I will go straight to subtitles (I cannot stand the standard Russian style of translating movies with one or two people who basically read the movie over the original soundtrack).
And this is exactly why I LOVE the dubbed Spanish version of the Chinese movie “KUNG FU HUSTLE”, as I explain in this post in another thread on the subject.
Holy shit, someone voted for the voiceover?
Now that would be cretinous.
I picked “Other” but probably should have picked subtitles. I watch with captions on wherever possible. I don’t know if I have hearing damage but I also prefer the movie sounds relatively quiet.
I accept dubbing in three circumstances:
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When the original cast does the english dubbing (See e.g. Das Boot, possibly Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).
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When it is an animated feature where there is some attempt to sync with the visuals (I enjoyed the original english dub of Akira, and I’ve gotten used to the newer version of the dubbing as well, I’ve watched it with original sound and subtitles as well and it all works).
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it is a “non-serious” film not readily avaialble in the original language. I’ve watched dubbed Chinese action comedies as well but would have preferred the subtitled version.
I’ve seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon many times and never once with the English dubbing, even if many of the principals did their own English. I’ve seen the dubbed Das Boot once (on TV) but generally watch it in German with subtitles as it syncs better.
Cheers,
-DF
Dub vs. Sub is a perennial debate among anime viewers. The reason I vastly prefer subtitled for Japanese is because there are levels that are impossible to translate into English. With dub only, some things shown in the picture make absolutely no sense, no matter how good the translator and voice actors are. I’ve seen dubbed versions of Vampire Hunter D, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Spirited Away, and they’re honestly different movies in the dubbed version. Some character motivations are changed, the mood of some scenes is different, and some actions that seem perfectly normal in Japan are rendered bizarrely out of place when set against an English voice.
I flatly reject one of the arguments that usually comes up in these discussions; that all animated movies are dubbed, so a different dubbing doesn’t matter. Bullshit. Word choice conveys context. Tone conveys emotion. Language carries culture with it. A dub is fundamentally different than an original language track with textual notes for showing equivalent meaning. A translation is always a delicate balancing act between literal meaning and connotative feeling, and inevitably something is lost, twisted, or pounded roughly into shape to fit the target language.
With subtitles, at least I can listen to the original Japanese and get the nuances that don’t readily translate. And there are a lot of those. The title of Spirited Away, for example, was originally Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, which means “Sen and Chihiro’s mysterious disappearance.” They (wisely) used 神隠し (kamikakushi) which can also be closely translated as “spirited away” instead of spending a couple of sentences explaining the wordplay in the title.
So, who the hell is Sen? Who is Chihiro? In the dub, they show that Yubaba (i.e.: the witch of the bath) steals part of Chihiro’s name, but you have no idea why she’s then called Sen. Sen is an alternate reading of the 千 character (lit. thousand) component of 千尋, which is read “chi” in Chihiro’s name. The second character is “hiro” which means fathom. So her name is literally, like, really deep, man. With a conscientious subtitler, you can easily show this with a little extra contextual writing, but with a dub version such on-screen commentary is almost always omitted.
With languages I don’t understand, I still prefer subtitles. Dubbing always provokes cognitive dissonance. Having watched movies in a language I don’t know, with only Japanese subtitles, I can kinda-sorta understand the point of view of the dub-only crowd, but it makes me even more convinced that they are “teh dum.” Reading subs in Japanese means I have to concentrate, and it’s way slower for me than reading English. If you’re a poor reader, I can see why you might prefer dubbing. But that means that if you prefer the dub version, I’m likely to think that you’re a poor reader, which, yes, means that I’m going to have disparaging thoughts about your intelligence.
Umm I really never cared why she was called Sen. I thought there was a LOT more to the movie than calligraphy and semantics.
Ironically, Hayao Miyazaki disagrees. He’s said he prefers his movies to be dubbed rather than subtitled.
Subtitles all the way. But there have been a few occasions where I first saw a foreign film with dubbing. Usually that ends up being my preferred way to watch it. Examples are Ghost In The Shell, Ghost In The Shell SAC, Sailor Moon, Jet Li’s Black Mask (excellent dubbing IMO), and…that’s it.
One reason I prefer subtitles is because if the film takes place in France or Japan, it would take me out of the movie if everyone is speaking English, and worse, when the voices are off from how they “look” like they would talk.
Yeah, the tone changes always got me. The voices Disney chooses for Miyazaki’s movies are great, but characters and scene tone change a lot. You watch the original Princess Mononoke and that is some serious, heavy stuff. You watch the Disney version and suddenly Jiko-bo is delivering lines with a funny snark and every scene with Kohroku becomes pure comedic fodder. I mean, he’s getting shot at by arrows and he’s still delivering comedic-style screams.
Disney does good dubbing in general, but the changes they make don’t sit very well with me sometimes. I tend to go subtitled simply because I want to see the original creator’s intent.
Don’t even get into the hamfisted way dubbers deal with honorifics and nicknames.
I also prefer to watch English-speaking films with the French subtitles on (some are translated way better than others). I tend to miss or mishear dialogue, so having the subtitles on is most useful at not missing out on anything.
In addition to my native English. I fluently understand Italian ,Spanish ,French and German…so I’d pick dubbed…or no subtitles…I find myself constantly “checking” the translation and snarkily pointing out errors in the translation. Yep. I’m an ass.
The thread asks about my ideal. And my ideal is good dubbing that gets the tone of the work and is good in its own right. Therefore, I pick dubbing.
Plus I find it annoying to have to stare at the same place on the screen the whole time. I may want to stretch my neck for a bit. With dubbing, I can do that during heavy conversation. With subbing, I can’t.
I don’t really understand how reading subtitles would make you miss action. They’re in the same place. It’s not like the subtitles are happening in a different room. You can see them while you see the action.
I don’t even consciously read subtitles, it’s more like osmosis. They’re on the screen, I watch the action and the subtitles are absorbed. I think it’s a practice thing. I grew up in the Netherlands, where everything has subtitles. I always understood the English, so I didn’t have to look at the subtitles, but since they were there, they were part of what I saw - they were absorbed.
Dubbing in a different language is always terrible.
To me it’s much the same as closed captioning on television. I have had a TV with CC for years, although my hearing is just fine; I like looking at the captions.
More importantly, my Mom has become hard of hearing and the two sets she owns, one in the front room and one in the kitchen, are both set to captioning; she doesn’t consider it distracting. 
If the translation is done well (which is rare) and the overdubbing is unobtrusive (even rarer), I prefer hearing both the foreign language and the original beneath it. Otherwise I would rather have subtitles, even though they can distract from the action.
Once in a great while, there are voice actors who specialize in dubbing one international star or another; in cases like this, dubbed films can be quite good. In Russia and Czechoslovakia (probably other countries as well), the movies of Louis de Funès were dubbed by such actors and are still hysterically funny.
When I first moved to Czechoslovakia, I was watching de Funès’ Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob in the original with Czech subtitles. My French was good enough for me to understand about 50% of the spoken dialogue, and Czech is close enough to Russian so that I was able to fill in the other 50% from the text at the bottom of the screen.
Slightly different experience: I was dragged to see La Traviata at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. They had a scrolling translation of the Italian on an LED panel mounted above the stage. It was* impossible* to read the translation and watch the action at the same time, so I just sat back and listened to the pretty music.
When I lived in Czechoslovakia, I watched German late-night TV on the weekends with no translation. You’d be amazed at just how much soft-core porn can boost your language skills! :o