In praise of subtitles

[Reno]

I'm less bothered by dubs when it comes to animation, especially when watching with children. I entertained my godson with several Studio Ghibli films and the dubs didn't bother me as much as they would with live action because all animation is basically dubbed. I probably would feel similar about games.

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

I didn't even know it was a video game, but then that's something I really know nothing about.

Yeah it was the video game. Because the makers of the game CD Projekt and the original books were polish I thought I'd give the game a go in polish. I already play japanese games in japanese with english subs.

I think I gave up as the voice acting didn't seem great in polish. Or at least it didn't click with me.

 

[stdP]

Dubbing video games is a different kettle of fish to filming an actor - most games these days use software that'll aid in syncing up characters mouth movements with various different dialogue tracks instead of doing it all manually, so mouth movements will generally match the sound. As Reno points out, dubbing over an actors lines - no matter how skilful the translation and matching up with the lip movements is done, it's never on a par with the actual performance. Italy follows the same format as Germany in that almost everything is dubbed and I find it fairly unwatchable in most cases. But I'm sure a rant on the many failings of dubbing deserves its own thread

Even though firms like Ghibli put a lot of time, money and effort in to the english dubs*, and animation being an art form significantly more tolerant of dodgy dubbing, it still sounds better to me in its original language. One annoying side effect of english dubs existing is that the subtitles will give a direct translation of the english dub rather than a fairer approximation of the original language, which can also often make for greater inaccuracies than the dub alone.

By the way, thanks mrsfran and scifisam for your work I've done a few bits of subtitle editing for my own collection (mostly proofreading and time correction, but I have one film which I did the subtitling on from scratch since no subs of it seems to have existed anywhere ever - it took me days) and would like to thank you for your frequently underappreciated work.

* [non-subtitle related trivia derail] For those of you who are unaware, Miyazaki's first pre-Ghibli foray in to the western market, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind was utterly butchered in the editing and dubbing rooms; after this, Ghibli always insisted on full creative control and famously sent Harvey Weinstein a katana with the message "no cuts" when they heard he wanted to dumb down Princess Mononoke.

 

[discokermit]

i hate subtitles. i have damaged hearing from work and tinnitis but still find them too distracting. having my eyes constantly drawn to the bottom of the screen means i miss out on what is actually going on, the body language and facial expressions. subtitles make me put too much emphasis on the words to the detriment of the other forms of communication being used. i would rather guess or lipread what is being said.
foreign films i tolerate the subs because i like to listen to the sounds of whatever language it is and also the lips moving differently can be distracting. well done dubbing can be good though.

 

[Epona]

Yeah it was the video game. Because the makers of the game CD Projekt and the original books were polish I thought I'd give the game a go in polish. I already play japanese games in japanese with english subs.

I think I gave up as the voice acting didn't seem great in polish. Or at least it didn't click with me.

Certainly the English voice acting on #2 and #3 of the games was very good. Excellent games too.

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

I think the rise of gaming has really helped up the status of good voice acting. Partly by showing how bad it can get.
Admittedly all the big movies do tend to hire named stars instead of actual voice actors but that's more to do with branding. Well also what happened with aladdin and robin williams.

Spoiler: more about the switch from voice actors to regular actors

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

Certainly the English voice acting on #2 and #3 of the games was very good. Excellent games too.

I never really looked at the voice acting in two. admittedly it was only really 3 that got me properly into the series. I have all of them but I bounced off of the first two.

 

[Epona]

I never really looked at the voice acting in two. admittedly it was only really 3 that got me properly into the series. I have all of them but I bounced off of the first two.

#3 was definitely the crowning jewel.

 

[mrsfran]

i hate subtitles. i have damaged hearing from work and tinnitis but still find them too distracting. having my eyes constantly drawn to the bottom of the screen means i miss out on what is actually going on, the body language and facial expressions. subtitles make me put too much emphasis on the words to the detriment of the other forms of communication being used. i would rather guess or lipread what is being said.
foreign films i tolerate the subs because i like to listen to the sounds of whatever language it is and also the lips moving differently can be distracting. well done dubbing can be good though.

Do you have hearing aids? If you struggle to hear the TV but don't want subtitles, I'd recommend them.

 

[scifisam]

I'm less bothered by dubs when it comes to animation, especially when watching with children. I entertained my godson with several Studio Ghibli films and the dubs didn't bother me as much as they would with live action because all animation is basically dubbed. I probably would feel similar about games.

Animation and anything where part of the primary market is children is a little different, because little kids can't read at all and slightly older kids can't read at the same speed as adults. It's much easier to justify dubs there (though having subtitles as an option is still preferable).

But I think it also feels a little different because you know the voices are separate to the character anyway. Even if the voice performance is different in style, it's not quite the same as replacing the voice of a human live action performer.

 

[scifisam]

Living in Germany, everything non-German language is dubbed and everybody is used to it. I'm getting my German boyfriend used to watching non-German films and tv with subtitles, so with him I watch everything with German subtitles. German being such an unwieldy language, you have to read more quickly when you rely on subtitles, I noticed. On my own I don't watch German and English language content with subtitles unless something is really hard to understand. I remember needing subtitles for The Wire, as I found the Baltimore accents hard to follow.

I've recently been working on subtitles for the German market (in German and English). There were a couple of interesting changes I made - for UK subs we can choose to subtitle either by words per minute or characters per minute, but for German it makes much more sense to choose characters per minute because of the length of some words.

The UK recommended reading speed changed a few years ago (Mrsfran knows more about that than I do), and I think the German team was going by the old speed. It was far too slow for German - it meant editing every single utterance down to the point where far too much meaning was lost. I suggested increasing the speed to our UK speed and they were fine with that.

With subtitles you always have to choose between retaining meaning (as close to what's spoken as possible), and allowing people time to read (which is always slower than listening time, even for fast readers). But you can't treat every language as if it has the same reading speed. Any German who can read German in print in other formats is used to the reading processes required for that, and I suspect that's faster than reading speeds for English, because meaning is far more often combined into one word, and you get the meaning from just seeing that word.

With German you also have the challenge of making sure you keep all the meaning available in easy chunks. Listening to a very long sentence that ends in a separable prefix can be difficult, but it's even more difficult if the main verb is in one subtitle and the prefix is in the next (especially if there's a scene change but the character keeps talking). It's sometimes better to rephrase.

I think it might be one of the many reasons dubs are still more popular in German. It's just a more difficult language to fit in to 44 characters per line / 88 per subtitle (open captions), at least in comparison to many other European languages.

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

I would say that dubbing and being voice acted is not the same.

in one case the animation and voice actor are specifically matched by the creative team. The other is an interpretation happening. The timing, cadence, and meaning change. Even if you manipulate the lip synching and timing (not always the case) the meaning can shift dramatically due to the differences in language subtleties.

 

[scifisam]

I would say that dubbing and being voice acted is not the same.

in one case the animation and voice actor are specifically matched by the creative team. The other is an interpretation happening. The timing, cadence, and meaning change. Even if you manipulate the lip synching and timing (not always the case) the meaning can shift dramatically due to the differences in language subtleties.

Yes, but less so than in live action dubs. I've watched some where the dubbed voice is really mis-matched to the character being played. Female characters tend to have extremely high voices, even when the original actress didn't, and it doesn't really fit the character. I subtitled one film recently where the German dub gave every woman apart from the main Mom character a voice like a little girl, and since many of the characters were prostitutes, but adult ones, it changed the movie and made it an awful lot creepier.

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

With your example you could equally have a animated film where the same mismatch occurs.

I often have a very odd experience watching dubbed anime because I know what is intended to happen with line but then I hear the interpretation and it can be wildly off what I expect from a character.

When it gets to dialects things can get even stranger.

I remember one example where the translated dialogue was

Character 1: Thank you!
Character 2: What?
Character 3: She said thank you. It means thank you.

It was because character 1 said おおきに
Character 2 was not a native japanese speaker so Character 3 needed it to be explained that おおきに had the same meaning as ありがとう

 

[scifisam]

With your example you could equally have a animated film where the same mismatch occurs.

I often have a very odd experience watching dubbed anime because I know what is intended to happen with line but then I hear the interpretation and it can be wildly off what I expect from a character.

When it gets to dialects things can get even stranger.

I remember one example where the translated dialogue was

Character 1: Thank you!
Character 2: What?
Character 3: She said thank you. It means thank you.

It was because character 1 said おおきに
Character 2 was not a native japanese speaker so Character 3 needed it to be explained that おおきに had the same meaning as ありがとう

Sort of. You can mismatch an original character that had a low-pitched tone to one who had a high-pitched tone, same as in my example.

But it is different when all the voice actors (in Japanese, English, German, etc) are creating a character by voicing the character, as opposed to an actor dubbing an an actor who has a voice of their own.

The translation can be very different, agreed, sometimes weirdly so. I've come across some really really odd ones that had no justification I could work out. But that's a different thing - the subs and the dubs will both have to be translated.

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

But it is different when all the voice actors (in Japanese, English, German, etc) are creating a character by voicing the character, as opposed to an actor dubbing an an actor who has a voice of their own.

I would normally say that a character is created by the creators of the animation then the voice actor tries to match that character. If the voice actor uses the same language and has experience with the same media as the creative team they are more likely to match the original idea of the character. In the vases where the character is shaped by the voice performance than again that voice and the animated performance are also paired.

I do get there is another layer of interpretation but I would say that the undubbed version is the original voice in a very similar way to the filmed version.

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

I would also say subbs seem to have more flexibility in translation. You can fit in more nuance if your not trying to match timing and lip-synching.

not that I haven't read some amazingly bad subs too.

Like the one where one character refers to the other as 'sensei' but the translation uses the phrase 'Ms. Kazumi'.
It make for some surreal moments. and it's not like sensei is a unknown term.

 

[Epona]

I have a whole mess of communication issues - most pressing is an auditory processing disorder, which (paired with some regular hearing loss and tinnitus) means I ALWAYS have subs turned on for everything I watch if they are available.

However, I also sometimes find it difficult to understand dialogue by subs alone (someone recently said to me that recent research shows that APD rarely exists without some form of dyslexia - if I understood that info properly) - it sometimes feels like I need 2 points of reference in order to understand dialogue - so for some things with non-English dialogue, I watch dubbed AND with subtitles.

I realise that isn't a usual situation by any means, to be partially dependent on both.

I am extremely glad that various options exist for people like me.

 

[Orang Utan]

I think the rise of gaming has really helped up the status of good voice acting. Partly by showing how bad it can get.
Admittedly all the big movies do tend to hire named stars instead of actual voice actors but that's more to do with branding. Well also what happened with aladdin and robin williams.

Spoiler: more about the switch from voice actors to regular actors

It’s not always great just cos they’re big stars though. Either poor direction or lack of effort from the stars often makes for a disappointing experience. I’ve just started playing Far Cry 6 and Giancarlo Esposito is phoning it in as the main antagonist

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

Yeah much prefer actual voice actors for the most part.

 

[Artaxerxes]

Subtitles are great and it does my head in Amazon fucks around and doesn't add them to the majority of its content

 

[Elpenor]

I’ve been watching Deadwood on nowtv and the subtitles don’t work via my BT box. I think they do on other platforms as watched some episodes on laptop and they’re fine

 

[mrsfran]

I’ve been watching Deadwood on nowtv and the subtitles don’t work via my BT box. I think they do on other platforms as watched some episodes on laptop and they’re fine

Unfortunately, subtitles don't yet work on Now TV for complicated technical reasons, but they should be in place next year.

 

[Orang Utan]

Unfortunately, subtitles don't yet work on Now TV for complicated technical reasons, but they should be in place next year.

they do for me.

 

[T & P]

It might have been mentioned already, but apart from the artistic advantages of watching productions in their original language, I’ve always believed countries that show English language films and series non-dubbed end up with a much higher percentage of the adult population with a decent level of English vs countries that do not.

 

[Elpenor]

Unfortunately, subtitles don't yet work on Now TV for complicated technical reasons, but they should be in place next year.

Thanks that’s good to know, I’ve realised I can probably access NowTV via the smart tv, as opposed to the BT box, which should allow me subtitles (I think that worked for me last year).

Fortunately subtitles are not essential for me to follow a show.

 

[Reno]

It might have been mentioned already, but apart from the artistic advantages of watching productions in their original language, I’ve always believed countries that show English language films and series non-dubbed end up with a much higher percentage of the adult population with a decent level of English vs countries that do not.

It's a chicken/egg situation. Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands rarely dub films and the reason is that those are the (non English language) countries with the highest percentage of English proficiency among the population, because English language is compulsory at school from a young age. Then of course it helps further to learn the language that English language films/tv shows are rarely dubbed in those countries.

 

[T & P]

It's a chicken/egg situation. Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands rarely dub films and the reason is that those are the (non English language) countries with the highest percentage of English proficiency among the population, because English language is compulsory at school from a young age. Then of course it helps further to learn the language that English language films/tv shows are rarely dubbed in those countries.

Luckily standards have risen in Spanish education regarding foreign languages, but when I was a child in the early 80s your first school introduction to foreign languages in the curriculum came not before you were 11. Couple that with a complete absence of films and TV in the original language and no wonder we have traditionally lagged behind other European countries in foreign language proficiency.

 

[Elpenor]

Mid November for subtitles to return to channel 4. Not good enough, and not much of a commitment to disabilities for a channel intended to serve diverse audiences.

Channel 4 subtitles to remain unavailable until mid-November

Campaigners voice anger at continued outage of access services that also include signed broadcasts

www.theguardian.com

 

[Orang Utan]

Mid November for subtitles to return to channel 4. Not good enough, and not much of a commitment to disabilities for a channel intended to serve diverse audiences.

Channel 4 subtitles to remain unavailable until mid-November

Campaigners voice anger at continued outage of access services that also include signed broadcasts

www.theguardian.com

What a fucking shambles. They’ll get a massive fine from OffCom for this