I downloaded a foreign film a few days ago. "That's great," you might be thinking, "what a cultured fellow you are." Wrong. This is a Belarusian film. They are supposed to be speaking Belarusian. Yet when I started watching it only the sounds of perfectly affected British English met my ears and there was not a subtitle in sight. Will the twist be that this bunch of Soviet Union peasants grew up in Oxfordshire? Why does dubbing even exist? I'm not illiterate. I hardly think an illiterate person is interested in watching Soviet-era films. I want to know who is responsible for creating dubbed films and I want them rounded up, gassed, cremated and their ashes used as fertilizer.
>>17968 Dubbing and subtitles have their pros and cons. With subtitles, for instance, you can argue that if you're concentrating on reading the words you are missing the actor's delivery of them.
I want to play the Frank Skinner role here and protest against dubbed films being put into Room /101/ on the grounds that my favourite movie of all time as a bain was Jackie Chan's City Hunter, of which I had a dubbed copy on tape.
I was a snobby cunt about dubbed anime when I was a teenager, since they use the same voice actors for every fucking show. My mate, on the other hand, treat these voice actors like absolute royalty, and even went to the extreme of adding them on Facebook and practically squirting adolescent man-goo all over his room when a sad middle-aged American bloke whose income is based on talking like a child down a microphone accepted him.
It depends how slowly you read and everyone here is a speed-reading ninja according to the reading speed thread. I can normally take in a line of dialogue in a glance or two.
Often I've heard the dubbed version have horrible voice acting and sometimes it sounds like someone's robotically reading it. It's so distracting.
This is slightly related. I've heard some people claim they can't cope with black and white films because the lack of colour is distracting. I just kind of think "Oh" the same as if someone tells me they can't cope with subtitles. Actually the subtitles thing makes more sense if they read a little slower.
The default policy for many distributors is to dub, because the sad reality is that a lot of people have fairly poor literacy skills and struggle to keep up with subtitles. Preferences vary from country to country - in much of Europe, dubbing is the norm and subtitling is very niche. In Britain, foreign language films can often be assumed to appeal mainly to a sophisticated audience, but that isn't the case in non-English speaking countries. The Germans in particular hate subtitles, and dub pretty much everything.
Good distributors (Artificial Eye, Criterion, Optimum/StudioCanal) understand their audience and the films they are distributing, and know when subtitles are appropriate. Others are just box-shifters, shuffling cheap film rights about on the European DVD market, indifferent to whether their decisions are appropriate to the film, the audience and the cultural norms of their target market.
Analogously, during the widescreen switchover, a lot of arthouse films were released to VHS/DVD as terrible pan & scan versions; Many distributors had a default policy of using pan & scan, because of unsophisticated viewers who would complain about "the picture not filling the screen". It should be obvious that the audience for an obscure foreign film would rather see the film as the director intended, but a lot of distributors just didn't care.
I don't particularly care for subtitles, on account of film being a primarily visual medium, and subtitles force your eyes away from the visuals. However, a poor dub can ruin a film.
Both of those things make me internally dismiss a person as a thicko, but everyone has their preferences.
I'm not too bothered for dubs versus subs in animation, I think it's quite a pathetic debate- Subbed or dubbed, you're just watching cartoons. When it comes to films I can see the question mattering more, though. Consider that reading the subtitles momentarily takes your focus away from actually taking in the actor's performances, the actions taking place in the scene, if the director has aimed for any kind of subtlety then subtitles can completely ruin it. The trade-off is that a dubbing forces the dialogue to follow strange patterns, the translation can lose its nuances in order to fit the required spaces, but on the other hand the viewer is able to focus more attention on the actual film.
(Also, is it just me, or when you think back to memories of a subbed film that you know well, you hear the voices in your own language? Thinking to Battle Royale, I can hear Beat Takeshi's speech at the end in English with a rather racist Japanese accent.)
If you're watching a film at home, I think it's pretty normal for your eyes to sometimes wander away from the screen anyway, and for longer than it takes to glance at subtitles.
1st off OPlad, what a brilliant film. I agree that the dubbing of foreign features is absolutely ridiculous - it happened another time when I watched another Soviet war film (They Fought for the Country which features the Russian Shatner) and the most obnoxiously loud, out-of-synch dubbing in thick RADA-ese assaulted my ears. Why must the dvd distributor immediately assume, by putting the dubbing as the default setting, that the person who goes out of their way to buy a forrin lingo film to be unwilling to either read subtitles or not already have a functional grasp of the language? As an occasional "world cinema" viewer, I damn well know to expect people chirping away in Mongol or French.