About 80% of what I watch are Asian films, so, yeah, I have the subtitles on. Every once in a while I’ll turn them on for a U.S. film, but not as a general rule. Mainly for reasons others have given.
Ha, ha! I’m doing that right now for a Korean TV melodrama series: All In
At 8 discs, 3 episodes per disc, that is 24 hours of melodrama (i.e., a glorified soap opera). It’s not the greatest thing on video, but once I got into it, I’ve got to see it through to see what happens to all the plot lines, romances, etc… Putting it on 2X speed (the subs don’t show up on my player at 4X) keeps things moving along.
My fiance is a little hard of hearing - not very, but enough so that he has to turn up a movie really loud to get what’s going on, so he uses subtitles instead of insane volume. Since I’ve been with him, I often find myself turning the subtitles on when I’m watching a movie alone.
I also watch a lot of foreign-language films, so naturally I have those on. Besides, you miss so much…the best example I can think of is, in the third Indiana Jones, when Marcus Brody is out in the desert village, and people are offering him things, you can’t really hear what he’s saying. But he actually has a really funny line:
“What’s that? Water? No thank you, fish make love in it.”
We do for a lot of films, especially loud ones. It’s mostly so as we don’t wake the Shibblets. It’s almost never a case of not understanding an accent*, although sometimes you’ll get a “low talker” who is inordinately difficult to hear at the volume we keep the television.
*I did once watch “My Name Is Joe” in a Frankfurt movie theater. This film is set in Glasgow and I had to read the German subtitles for a while until I could understand the Glaswegian slang well enough to ignore the subtitles. But that’s not “real” English anyway.
Deaf person speaking. Although I tend to switch between the TV captions or the vanilla subtitles, or the subtitles for the Deaf. Depends on which one provides more background information, and/or how lazy I feel at the time.
Also, speed reading can spoil the movie for some hearing people? Never knew that – guess I’ve learned my Daily Factoid.
And here’s your daily factoid, Liberal. “Iron” also means homosexual - and is quite common in London. It’s rhyming slang for poof - “iron (hoof)”. So next time Vinnie Jones or Sean Bean says “He’s an iron”, you’ll be able to explain to your chinas.
Generally, I have on the subtitles for movies that were not made in english. I generally will listen only if the movie is in english, although we had several really good laughs at the subtitles for The Mummy (Brendan Fraser version) at a dopefest in Dallas a few years back.
There are separate “subtitles for the Deaf” that are different from the TV subtitles/DVD subtitles? Why? And how does one access them?
Well, it makes sense if you think about it… if a subtitle appears at the bottom of the screen saying “the killer was… THE JANITOR!”, and the character on screen starts saying the word “the” at the same time the subtitle appears, your brain will have read the sentence and parsed it by the time the character actually gets to the dramatic pause and then says “THE JANITOR”.
One movie that I don’t like using subtitles on is Battle of Britain. Originally, only the German dialogue was subbed (in white letters, which was annoying when some fat dude started wandering around in a white uniform talking and I had no clue what the heck he was going on about). Whenever you have other characters talking in foreign languages (usually French and Polish folks) you have to rely on the context of the scene, or in one case, a British pilot translating for his friends.
On the DVD, the subtitles have translated all the French and Polish stuff too, rendering the British pilot totally redundant for the audience, and ruining some of the best comedy of the movie with the Polish pilots chattering away while their British commander blusters at them to be quiet.
I’m a subtitle/closed caption person too. I’m usually doing something else when I watch TV, so it helps to follow the action.
Even when I’m just watching, I find it easier to comprehend the dialogue when there is text going at the same time. I’m fairly sure I haven’t gone deaf yet - I’ve attended a grand total of, like, three rock concerts, but for whatever reason I find it difficult to stay focused without something to read.
That reminds me of a story my friend told me the other day. She had been watching something on DVD with the subtitles turned on, but not paying too much attention to them. As she kept watching, she thought to herself, “I can understand this, why are there subtitles?” So she turned them off.
Random aside here for those who have mentioned the disparity of sound level between action and dialogue. If you’re watching DVDs on a surround-sound system, it’s probably a matter of speaker levels. Sound effects generally go to the front left and right speakers, dialogue usually goes to the center channel.
Turn up the volume on the center speaker (use the “test signal” option to bounce a test signal around the speakers to balance it all out), and the disparity usually goes away. (Some movies are just damn loud.)
Another tip for those who don’t like it when the sound effects and music drown out the dialogue. Some entertainment systems have “compression”. If you select this it lowers the volume of the loud parts.
On the subject of closed captions, I accidently had these selected for a movie I was watching a while ago. I had no idea what was going on when the opening (non-dialogue) sequences had this type of thing at the bottom of the screen:
I turn them on quite often sometimes because of hard to understand accents but mostly because turning up the volume enough to hear the dialogue would make it loud enough to disturb someone sleeping.
