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This would be a lovely option to have and I find it hilarious that anyone imagines that subtitles are some kind of problem we are trying to get out of. Adding

This would be a lovely option to have and I find it hilarious that anyone imagines that subtitles are some kind of problem we are trying to get out of. Adding text to movies has a huge array of advantages: it preserves the original performances, it makes the dialog accessible to people with hearing or auditory processing disabilities, they can be multiplexed in a way that audio cannot, etc. Obviously it would be wonderful to have an 'autodub' option! But the times where one would use it seem quite narrow.

hepaminondas 5y ago
Yes. It also forces people to read and allows them to be exposed to foreign languages.
hiptobecubic 5y ago
I don't know. I'm not sure it's really possible to overestimate how many people hate reading and view it as a chore. Even without that not-so-charitable interpretation, there is still the "TV is on but I'm focused on something else" use case. Subtitles don't work at all for that.
- fomine3 5y ago
  It may getting work with AR grasses. I can't wait.
Swizec 5y ago
Coming from a non english country I can assure you that dubbing is the worst. When we were kids we would actively avoid watching anything that was dubbed as soon as we could read. It’s actually funny seeing how frustrated with subtitles my American girlfriend gets when we watch anything foreign. “You mean this basic skill every 7 year old has is hard for you, an educated super smart 30 year old? Bwahahaha” I still prefer watching everything with subtitles. Actors mumble a lot.
- samtheDamned 5y ago
  > I still prefer watching everything with subtitles. Actors mumble a lot. Yep I have no problems hearing but newer movies and shows have uneven mixing where it can get really hard to hear over the background noise and subtitles come in clutch constantly for that
- Kuinox 5y ago
  It depends of the country. French have great dubs and most of the movie released are watched dubbed.
- stormbrew 5y ago
  I have complicated feelings about this. I also watch most things with subtitles these days, because either (or probably both) my hearing is going a bit or sound design/editing in films and tv shows has gotten worse, but there is a non-trivial difference in how I perceive things with or without. With subtitles my eyes are drawn more often to a part of the screen where nothing visual is happening. They aren't glued there, but it does create some bias. I have occasionally rewatched a scene without subtitles and noticed a lot of subtlety in the performance I had missed the first time though. That said, a bad dub is at least as distracting. Probably much more so, if anything. I would rather watch a bad sub than a bad dub, though I have occasionally enjoyed dubbed things as well. I don't think it's an all or nothing thing, but "never watch dubs" is the hard line heuristic that makes sense to me if you're gonna go that way.
  - ubercow13 5y ago
    At least with subs the performance is there for you to see (and hear), even if you sometimes miss it. With dubs, half the performance is removed completely.
- openknot 5y ago
  I share the same experience of preferring subtitles over dubs, coming from an English country. This is most popular with Japanese media like anime (like movies like 'Your Name'/'Kimi no wa na' or Attack on Titan). It also fits for foreign language films (e.g. preferring the original German for The Lives of Others/Wings of Desire). Crucially, outside of preference, subtitles are occasionally necessary for translating text on the screen (e.g. on building signs, newspaper front pages, posters, chalkboard writing), as information is conveyed solely through writing without spoken dialogue. For example, consider the chalkboard scene in "Komi san can't communicate": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoH8I-NC5tM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoH8I-NC5tM . It's key to the story that a character has trouble communicating verbally, so subtitles are essential to understand the written communication on the chalkboard. (You can then compare to a more extensively subtitled version that translates all the text on the board; good subtitles make a difference to storytelling: https://old.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/qdjgba/the_blackboard_scene_komi_cant_communicate/ https://old.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/qdjgba/the_blackboar...).
Bilal_io 5y ago
I can confirm as an anime fan, when watching One Piece I prefer to watch it in Japanese as the dubbed version sounds odd. it was an advantage growing up watching Hollywood movies in English with Arabic subtitles, it helped me learn the language.
- moffkalast 5y ago
  It also helps when what you're watching has atrocious audio mixing (looking at you Nolan), or you have shit speakers, or actors mumble or whisper, in which case it's helpful to have them as an aid when something's not clear.
- Dracophoenix 5y ago
  I guess you were a fan of MBC 2 then?
  - Bilal_io 5y ago
    And MBC Action
    - Dracophoenix 5y ago
      Were you a fan of MBC 3?
      - Bilal_io 5y ago
        Ages ago. But the ads on MBC network... The meme was that you're watching ads and they hit you with a show.
        Dracophoenix 5y ago
        Do you remember the name of a cartoon short involving a rotund orange cat walking around the city doing engaging in various hijinks before it arrived home unnoticed? It's been bugging me for ages. It played between shows in place of a commercials in-between shows circa 2006.
commandlinefan 5y ago
> subtitles are some kind of problem Heck, they're not even limited to foreign languages. I put them on in English because I'm starting to lose my hearing now in my late 40's and if I turn up the volume loud enough that I can hear the dialogue ok, the sound effects would be so loud they'd set off the neighbor's car alarm.
- aeturnum 5y ago
  I also use them regularly in my native language! Very helpful in noisy environments.
  - ncpa-cpl 5y ago
    And very helpful for slang too. I speak Spanish well, but I always add subtitles in English or other language in case I miss a word of two from another Spanish variety.
- epolanski 5y ago
  many reasons to use them: - family is sleeping so you keep volume low - hard to understand accents or lingo - bad audio mixing or bad audio systems that muffle words and rest of the sound
  - wyldfire 5y ago
    > hard to understand accents or lingo It's easy to tell which transcription services have access to the original script as a reference and which don't. I have subs on most of the time to catch subtle or barely-audible dialogue (or to decipher accents). There's sometimes when I can tell "oh gee that's not right at all but I can see how you misheard it." And there's other times when dialogue is coming from offscreen or a TV/radio and it's too far in the background to understand unless you are reading along with the script.
  - maroonblazer 5y ago
    - You're a euro-, arab-, and/or, asia-phile (I'm in the U.S.) and the sound of the language further transports you to those parts of the world.
nkozyra 5y ago
> I find it hilarious that anyone imagines that subtitles are some kind of problem we are trying to get out of. I think there's a lot of gatekeeping about this. People - perhaps rightfully so - believe subtitled versions to be more ... "pure" than dubbed versions. I don't watch any language dubbed movies, but I wouldn't chide anyone who did. Not everyone wants to spend the whole two hours glancing up and down across the screen, nor are they necessarily wanting to learn a language passively, etc. So I think there's absolutely a perceived problem, it just doesn't apply to all viewers.
- jonpurdy 5y ago
  > I think there's a lot of gatekeeping about this. People - perhaps rightfully so - believe subtitled versions to be more ... "pure" than dubbed versions. Well, they are more pure than dubbed versions. There is so much nuance and tone in the original language that is either left out or changed in the dub. Not to mention word order (subject-verb-object in English/Chinese, subject-object-verb in Japanese/Korean) that further changes the timing of impactful words. I am not looking forward to having to watch the dub versions of Totoro and other Miyazaki films when my daughter is between 2-7 years old...
  - Bedon292 5y ago
    When I was a kid, my dad was stationed in Japan. We watched all kinds of stuff, including Totoro on Japanese TV. No subtitles or dubs. Not a clue what they were actually saying but we all enjoyed it anyways. So you could always try it out and see how it goes.
    - jonpurdy 5y ago
      I don't know why I didn't think of this before... thanks! I will definitely try that out, especially since at such a young age she won't be able to sit through a whole film anyway.
  - earthboundkid 5y ago
    I have been watching dubs of Ghibli with my kids. It’s fine. It would be better to watch the subs for me, but I’m not going to get bent out of shape about it. They usually have pretty good English voice casting. I kind of like Kirstin Dunst as Kiki.
jmckib 5y ago
I love subtitles, but for me they tend to spoil the timing of the lines being delivered, especially with comedy. Unfortunately subtitles are necessary even when I'm able to play audio as loud as I want, because it's almost always hard to understand at least 10-20% of the words that actors are saying. Maybe it would be nice to have subtitles that appear a word at a time as they are spoken, but I imagine that's not very practical for various reasons.
- aeturnum 5y ago
  I would also love to a more responsive subtitle format! I've seen some really wonderful custom jobs where people use different subtitle colors for different speakers, place subtitles near the speaker in the frame, etc. I think there is a ton of room for improving the expressiveness of the medium.
  - zeroimpl 5y ago
    A pet peeve of mine has been subtitles which flip the order of words, particularly when the sentence is broken into two lines. Like the spoken text in foreign language is “A murderer is... Joe” but it gets translated to “Joe is a... murderer”. The other day I happened to see live content with closed captions, and I thought I would love the option to see subtitles like this, where words are translated precisely when spoken.
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      But translation doesn't really work like that. There are significant tradeoffs between verbosity, cadence, meaning and subtext when translating. The different contraints are why the forieng dubbibg and foreign subtitles are usually quite different. You generally only see word for word matches with subtitles when the subtitles are in the same language as the original lines spoken by the actors.
      - lisper 5y ago
        And the GP's example is the perfect illustration. "A murderer is Joe" sounds really weird. No native English speaker would ever say that. They would say, "Joe is a murderer" or "The murderer is Joe" or even "One of the murderers is Joe." But never "A murderer is Joe." Maybe in a Victorian novel, but not in a movie.
Findecanor 5y ago
In my country (Sweden) subtitles are the norm for imported content, with most of that content being in English. I believe that reading the Swedish subtitles and hearing the English words simultaneously have played a large role in helping Swedes to learn English. However, it does help a lot that the grammar of Swedish and English is relatively similar. I have been trying to use watching anime to get better at Japanese, and the different word-order and clause-order in the spoken Japanese to the subtitles have often tripped me up — especially when longer sentences have got broken up into multiple subtitles.
- webmaven 5y ago
  > In my country (Sweden) subtitles are the norm for imported content, with most of that content being in English. That was the norm as I was growing up in Israel, with the exception being children's programming (usually animation) that was dubbed. The dubbing was usually quite good, and done by actors prominent in children's programming. OTOH, being bilingual myself, the poor translation of subtitles was constantly driving me up the wall. I just couldn't ignore the mismatch between the dialog in English and the subtitles in Hebrew, but the rest of my family wouldn't agree to let me cover the bottom fifth of the screen. Semantically, the translations were generally accurate except in infrequent cases where the translator obviously misheard something or translated a phrase overly literally (more often with non-RP British or Australian English than American), but stylistically, the translation was always bland and "correct" (eg. "sure" and "yeah" and "you bet" would all inevitably be translated as "yes").
fxtentacle 5y ago
Agree. Dolby Atmos releases tend to have a lot of noisy background sounds all around you, and then people silently mumble on the center channel. My English is really good, but some movies are still difficult to watch without subtitles. For example, Hawkeye jumped in between "painfully loud effects" and "barely audible dialog".
- ASalazarMX 5y ago
  Eating pop corn while watching a movie has become increasingly difficult with this kind of sound mixing.
- kpozin 5y ago
  This is actually an improvement over stereo soundtracks, as you can just raise the relative volume of the center channel!
  - fxtentacle 5y ago
    My TV can't do that :(
tlbsofware 5y ago
Personally I would like if someone could use AI to enhance the voices of the actors, I find a lot of movies like to use loud ominous music while the characters are casually talking in a soft voice. Really drives me insane, and placing subtitles helps this problem but it creates a new one, I tend to get distracted by the subtitles and find myself not watching the movie
- acchow 5y ago
  This could be an issue with your audio mixing in your particular speaker setup. Often times trying to play audio meant for surround systems (5.1, 7.1, etc) on stereo channels results in a poor audio mix.
  - thfuran 5y ago
    And Netflix in particular seems to love defaulting to 5.1 tracks when it shouldn't.
    - ncpa-cpl 5y ago
      Diney Plus too
    - acchow 5y ago
      I don't even see an option to manually select a stereo track anymore. They seem to have removed it from my Smart TV's app.
      - thfuran 5y ago
        I don't think I've yet encountered something with an English 5.1 track that doesn't also have an English stereo track mixed in with whatever foreign language tracks are present but who knows what features any given app has.
- robocat 5y ago
  a way to remove the mood music and leave the voices and foley. I really enjoyed the cinematography of a film the other day, but the music completely ruined it.
FredPret 5y ago
It would be hilarious to see famous actors deepfaked into speaking foreign languages in a feature film. I suspect it simply won't work - translating accurately is really hard, but translating elegantly is frequently impossible. Some things are just easier/punchier/funnier to say in language A than B
- spc476 5y ago
  Laurel and Hardy would refilm many of their shorts in different languages, where they were speaking the foreign language. I always thought that was pretty cool.
- Dracophoenix 5y ago
  Already the case with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson speaking in German. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9613749/AI-company-uses-deepfake-technology-seamlessly-dub-favorite-actors-dialogue.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9613749/AI-c...
dheera 5y ago
Totally agree, I often much prefer subtitles to dubbing as I can hear the original voice artist's tone of expression as it was intended to be. Also, languages are bridges, not barriers, by exposing yourself more to another language you will learn it if you don't reject it.
- throwaway675309 5y ago
  That's a cute sentiment but there is no evidence that merely being exposed to a foreign language necessarily allows you to learn that language. I think you're confusing the movie 13th Warrior for reality. I have friends who religiously watch subtitled anime only and they are no closer to learning Japanese in any real sense of the word than a person who would watch the dubs, except for picking up a stray random word here or there, but knowing that kawaii means "cute" doesn't give you even a superficial understanding of Japanese. For that, you need to at least pick up hiragana and katakana. Learning a language requires deliberate work. There is no shortcut.
  - ncpa-cpl 5y ago
    English and Japanese are very different. I speak Spanish. Subtitles have helped me a lot when languages are similar. I watched three seasons of a Catalan TV show subtitled in Spanish, and now I can follow conversations and read it. Before that I wasn't able to understand spoken Catalan. Some language pairs were this may work are: - Spanish/Catalan - Portuguese/Spanish - Dutch/German
  - Izkata 5y ago
    Subtitles won't really help with sentence structure or conjugations, but it does help a lot with building vocabulary once you have the basics of sentence structure.
  - dheera 5y ago
    > no evidence that merely being exposed to a foreign language necessarily allows you to learn that language Um, that's how babies learn, I think there is plenty of evidence in every baby on the planet. People stop learning this way when they start thinking of languages as barriers.
tompetry 5y ago
I am very surprised more people watched the dubbed version of Squid Game over the subtitles. I saw a friend watching the dubbed version and to me it didn't "preserve the original performances" as you say. Surprised subtitles are a barrier, I enjoy them personally, but I guess they have the data to know. I have tested out services that translate your "own voice" to another language and it was pretty cool, although I couldn't tell if the translation was quality. Automated translation isn't a solved problem, and this seems more of an issue than the tone of voice.
- creakingstairs 5y ago
  When I've moved to New Zealand, I was taken aback at how many people just could not stand subtitles. This and your mention about 'barrier' reminded me of Bong Joon Ho (director of Parasite) calling this out: "Once you overcome the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films."
  - wumpus 5y ago
    ... and a well-deserved "Best Film" Oscar in the Academy awards, the first subtitled "foreign" film so awarded.
  - derekp7 5y ago
    The problem I have with subtitles is the same reason I could never enjoy comics / graphic novels. I can either read and process the text, or look at / process the action (pictures). For me it is the same thing as trying to pay attention to two conference calls at the same time with a phone in each ear (is it just me that can't do this?). And it isn't just the mental processing, the rest of the screen sort of disappears from my perception when reading subtitles. Now silent films aren't a problem, as the text is shown before / after a given scene. So there is no processing two things at the same time. And it isn't a reading problem in general, because I'm an avid book reader and can consume books quite fast (although I only enjoy them if I read them slower and contemplate each scene).
    - 5y ago
starburst 5y ago
Another advantage is that you can eat your chips and still understand what's going on.
aaron695 5y ago
throwaway675309 5y ago
Then you're simply not thinking about it deeply enough. There are plenty of shows that someone may want to watch but may not be able to invest 100% of my attention watching that show, therefore with a show dubbed in their native language, they can still have the show in the background while being able to listen to the audio. With subtitles one has to constantly be looking at the actual show itself. Furthermore if one makes use picture in picture such as on a mobile platform or a tablet device the subtitles are so correspondingly small as to be basically hieroglyphic at that point.
- distances 5y ago
  This use case is totally foreign to me. If I can't concentrate, I stop the show and continue some other time. Someone wants to check their phone or visit the loo? Pause the show. Linear television is history after all. That said, other people can obviously have their own preferences. Just sounds so weird to me.
vagrantJin 5y ago
I watch a lot of foreign films and dubbed version misses a lot of nuance - complexity of spoken language, inflection, depth. So maybe I watch the kind of stuff where that kind of performace is required. Maybe it has certain genres or mediums where dubs work well like Romcoms or Marvel movies.
jack_pp 5y ago
It might seem to you but producers care about data and I do not find it hard to believe people prefer dubbing to subtitles. I believe most people prefer audio input to text because it requires far less of their attention. You would be surprised how many people watch / listen to shows while doing something else and thus not giving the show their full attention. I'm guilty of this with podcasts.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  Maybe a system of always pandering to the lowest common denominator isn’t all it’s cracked up to be?
  - jack_pp 5y ago
    That's the most profitable system. It certainly doesn't produce the most quality. Just like making a tool that lasts a lifetime is not as profitable as making something that breaks. Maybe crowdfunding media content is the way to go for quality but I can certainly understand how public companies make decisions in their search for infinite profits.
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      > But I can certainly understand how public companies make decisions in their search for infinite profits. Well yes because it's not exactly novel or complex. My point isn't that there is no rationale it's whether we should just blindly go along with it.
      - jack_pp 5y ago
        Who is we? We the creators? We the consumers?
        meheleventyone 5y ago
        We as wider society which is why I criticize the system rather than the players.
Someone 5y ago
I’m in the “pro subtitles” camp, too, but they too have disadvantages. By changing part of the screen, they don’t preserve the original performance, either (but IMO, that’s a lesser problem than dubbing) and their timing often is off. You’ll read a joke before or after it’s made, may know somebody gets shot before it happens, etc. I think aster readers will have a larger problem there. They (obviously) also work less well for slower readers.
southerntofu 5y ago
After a decade of training their model Youtube can't even produce meaningful subtitles for ordinary words in English (let alone my native language, french) and we're supposed to trust these fucked-up AI overlords are going to produce any better dubbing? I have no doubt these solutions will be popular, because many people have difficulty reading and will prefer audio when given the option. I'm just confident they won't reach any measurable quality and the translations will be full of non-sensical/anti-thetical statements.
pavelrub 5y ago
In my experience people who dislike subtitles are mostly native English speakers living in English-speaking countries, who are used to the fact that almost all the media they consume is produced in their native language, and so they’ve never developed the ability to read subtitles comfortably. When the occasional rare case arises where they need to watch a foreign film/show, they find it straining to both read the subtitles and watch the film, and so they conclude that subtitles are bad or “not for them”. In practice this stems from lack of practice — the perceived conscious effort of having to read subtitles while watching a film disappears entirely after you have done it a few times with sufficient regularity, and becomes completely effortless, subconscious, and automatic. But this is a skill that needs to be developed. Saying that subtitles are bad because they distract from the film is like saying that riding a bicycle is bad because you fall all the time, when in reality you just haven’t learned to ride one.

hepaminondas 5y ago

Yes. It also forces people to read and allows them to be exposed to foreign languages.

hiptobecubic 5y ago

I don't know. I'm not sure it's really possible to overestimate how many people hate reading and view it as a chore. Even without that not-so-charitable interpretation, there is still the "TV is on but I'm focused on something else" use case. Subtitles don't work at all for that.

fomine3 5y ago
It may getting work with AR grasses. I can't wait.

Swizec 5y ago

Coming from a non english country I can assure you that dubbing is the worst. When we were kids we would actively avoid watching anything that was dubbed as soon as we could read. It’s actually funny seeing how frustrated with subtitles my American girlfriend gets when we watch anything foreign. “You mean this basic skill every 7 year old has is hard for you, an educated super smart 30 year old? Bwahahaha” I still prefer watching everything with subtitles. Actors mumble a lot.

samtheDamned 5y ago
> I still prefer watching everything with subtitles. Actors mumble a lot. Yep I have no problems hearing but newer movies and shows have uneven mixing where it can get really hard to hear over the background noise and subtitles come in clutch constantly for that
Kuinox 5y ago
It depends of the country. French have great dubs and most of the movie released are watched dubbed.
stormbrew 5y ago
I have complicated feelings about this. I also watch most things with subtitles these days, because either (or probably both) my hearing is going a bit or sound design/editing in films and tv shows has gotten worse, but there is a non-trivial difference in how I perceive things with or without. With subtitles my eyes are drawn more often to a part of the screen where nothing visual is happening. They aren't glued there, but it does create some bias. I have occasionally rewatched a scene without subtitles and noticed a lot of subtlety in the performance I had missed the first time though. That said, a bad dub is at least as distracting. Probably much more so, if anything. I would rather watch a bad sub than a bad dub, though I have occasionally enjoyed dubbed things as well. I don't think it's an all or nothing thing, but "never watch dubs" is the hard line heuristic that makes sense to me if you're gonna go that way.
- ubercow13 5y ago
  At least with subs the performance is there for you to see (and hear), even if you sometimes miss it. With dubs, half the performance is removed completely.
openknot 5y ago
I share the same experience of preferring subtitles over dubs, coming from an English country. This is most popular with Japanese media like anime (like movies like 'Your Name'/'Kimi no wa na' or Attack on Titan). It also fits for foreign language films (e.g. preferring the original German for The Lives of Others/Wings of Desire). Crucially, outside of preference, subtitles are occasionally necessary for translating text on the screen (e.g. on building signs, newspaper front pages, posters, chalkboard writing), as information is conveyed solely through writing without spoken dialogue. For example, consider the chalkboard scene in "Komi san can't communicate": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoH8I-NC5tM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoH8I-NC5tM . It's key to the story that a character has trouble communicating verbally, so subtitles are essential to understand the written communication on the chalkboard. (You can then compare to a more extensively subtitled version that translates all the text on the board; good subtitles make a difference to storytelling: https://old.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/qdjgba/the_blackboard_scene_komi_cant_communicate/ https://old.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/qdjgba/the_blackboar...).

Bilal_io 5y ago

I can confirm as an anime fan, when watching One Piece I prefer to watch it in Japanese as the dubbed version sounds odd. it was an advantage growing up watching Hollywood movies in English with Arabic subtitles, it helped me learn the language.

moffkalast 5y ago
It also helps when what you're watching has atrocious audio mixing (looking at you Nolan), or you have shit speakers, or actors mumble or whisper, in which case it's helpful to have them as an aid when something's not clear.
Dracophoenix 5y ago
I guess you were a fan of MBC 2 then?
- Bilal_io 5y ago
  And MBC Action
  - Dracophoenix 5y ago
    Were you a fan of MBC 3?
    - Bilal_io 5y ago
      Ages ago. But the ads on MBC network... The meme was that you're watching ads and they hit you with a show.
      - Dracophoenix 5y ago
        Do you remember the name of a cartoon short involving a rotund orange cat walking around the city doing engaging in various hijinks before it arrived home unnoticed? It's been bugging me for ages. It played between shows in place of a commercials in-between shows circa 2006.

commandlinefan 5y ago

> subtitles are some kind of problem Heck, they're not even limited to foreign languages. I put them on in English because I'm starting to lose my hearing now in my late 40's and if I turn up the volume loud enough that I can hear the dialogue ok, the sound effects would be so loud they'd set off the neighbor's car alarm.

aeturnum 5y ago
I also use them regularly in my native language! Very helpful in noisy environments.
- ncpa-cpl 5y ago
  And very helpful for slang too. I speak Spanish well, but I always add subtitles in English or other language in case I miss a word of two from another Spanish variety.
epolanski 5y ago
many reasons to use them: - family is sleeping so you keep volume low - hard to understand accents or lingo - bad audio mixing or bad audio systems that muffle words and rest of the sound
- wyldfire 5y ago
  > hard to understand accents or lingo It's easy to tell which transcription services have access to the original script as a reference and which don't. I have subs on most of the time to catch subtle or barely-audible dialogue (or to decipher accents). There's sometimes when I can tell "oh gee that's not right at all but I can see how you misheard it." And there's other times when dialogue is coming from offscreen or a TV/radio and it's too far in the background to understand unless you are reading along with the script.
- maroonblazer 5y ago
  - You're a euro-, arab-, and/or, asia-phile (I'm in the U.S.) and the sound of the language further transports you to those parts of the world.

nkozyra 5y ago

> I find it hilarious that anyone imagines that subtitles are some kind of problem we are trying to get out of. I think there's a lot of gatekeeping about this. People - perhaps rightfully so - believe subtitled versions to be more ... "pure" than dubbed versions. I don't watch any language dubbed movies, but I wouldn't chide anyone who did. Not everyone wants to spend the whole two hours glancing up and down across the screen, nor are they necessarily wanting to learn a language passively, etc. So I think there's absolutely a perceived problem, it just doesn't apply to all viewers.

jonpurdy 5y ago
> I think there's a lot of gatekeeping about this. People - perhaps rightfully so - believe subtitled versions to be more ... "pure" than dubbed versions. Well, they are more pure than dubbed versions. There is so much nuance and tone in the original language that is either left out or changed in the dub. Not to mention word order (subject-verb-object in English/Chinese, subject-object-verb in Japanese/Korean) that further changes the timing of impactful words. I am not looking forward to having to watch the dub versions of Totoro and other Miyazaki films when my daughter is between 2-7 years old...
- Bedon292 5y ago
  When I was a kid, my dad was stationed in Japan. We watched all kinds of stuff, including Totoro on Japanese TV. No subtitles or dubs. Not a clue what they were actually saying but we all enjoyed it anyways. So you could always try it out and see how it goes.
  - jonpurdy 5y ago
    I don't know why I didn't think of this before... thanks! I will definitely try that out, especially since at such a young age she won't be able to sit through a whole film anyway.
- earthboundkid 5y ago
  I have been watching dubs of Ghibli with my kids. It’s fine. It would be better to watch the subs for me, but I’m not going to get bent out of shape about it. They usually have pretty good English voice casting. I kind of like Kirstin Dunst as Kiki.

jmckib 5y ago

I love subtitles, but for me they tend to spoil the timing of the lines being delivered, especially with comedy. Unfortunately subtitles are necessary even when I'm able to play audio as loud as I want, because it's almost always hard to understand at least 10-20% of the words that actors are saying. Maybe it would be nice to have subtitles that appear a word at a time as they are spoken, but I imagine that's not very practical for various reasons.

aeturnum 5y ago
I would also love to a more responsive subtitle format! I've seen some really wonderful custom jobs where people use different subtitle colors for different speakers, place subtitles near the speaker in the frame, etc. I think there is a ton of room for improving the expressiveness of the medium.
- zeroimpl 5y ago
  A pet peeve of mine has been subtitles which flip the order of words, particularly when the sentence is broken into two lines. Like the spoken text in foreign language is “A murderer is... Joe” but it gets translated to “Joe is a... murderer”. The other day I happened to see live content with closed captions, and I thought I would love the option to see subtitles like this, where words are translated precisely when spoken.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    But translation doesn't really work like that. There are significant tradeoffs between verbosity, cadence, meaning and subtext when translating. The different contraints are why the forieng dubbibg and foreign subtitles are usually quite different. You generally only see word for word matches with subtitles when the subtitles are in the same language as the original lines spoken by the actors.
    - lisper 5y ago
      And the GP's example is the perfect illustration. "A murderer is Joe" sounds really weird. No native English speaker would ever say that. They would say, "Joe is a murderer" or "The murderer is Joe" or even "One of the murderers is Joe." But never "A murderer is Joe." Maybe in a Victorian novel, but not in a movie.

Findecanor 5y ago

In my country (Sweden) subtitles are the norm for imported content, with most of that content being in English. I believe that reading the Swedish subtitles and hearing the English words simultaneously have played a large role in helping Swedes to learn English. However, it does help a lot that the grammar of Swedish and English is relatively similar. I have been trying to use watching anime to get better at Japanese, and the different word-order and clause-order in the spoken Japanese to the subtitles have often tripped me up — especially when longer sentences have got broken up into multiple subtitles.

webmaven 5y ago
> In my country (Sweden) subtitles are the norm for imported content, with most of that content being in English. That was the norm as I was growing up in Israel, with the exception being children's programming (usually animation) that was dubbed. The dubbing was usually quite good, and done by actors prominent in children's programming. OTOH, being bilingual myself, the poor translation of subtitles was constantly driving me up the wall. I just couldn't ignore the mismatch between the dialog in English and the subtitles in Hebrew, but the rest of my family wouldn't agree to let me cover the bottom fifth of the screen. Semantically, the translations were generally accurate except in infrequent cases where the translator obviously misheard something or translated a phrase overly literally (more often with non-RP British or Australian English than American), but stylistically, the translation was always bland and "correct" (eg. "sure" and "yeah" and "you bet" would all inevitably be translated as "yes").

fxtentacle 5y ago

Agree. Dolby Atmos releases tend to have a lot of noisy background sounds all around you, and then people silently mumble on the center channel. My English is really good, but some movies are still difficult to watch without subtitles. For example, Hawkeye jumped in between "painfully loud effects" and "barely audible dialog".

ASalazarMX 5y ago
Eating pop corn while watching a movie has become increasingly difficult with this kind of sound mixing.
kpozin 5y ago
This is actually an improvement over stereo soundtracks, as you can just raise the relative volume of the center channel!
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  My TV can't do that :(

tlbsofware 5y ago

Personally I would like if someone could use AI to enhance the voices of the actors, I find a lot of movies like to use loud ominous music while the characters are casually talking in a soft voice. Really drives me insane, and placing subtitles helps this problem but it creates a new one, I tend to get distracted by the subtitles and find myself not watching the movie

acchow 5y ago
This could be an issue with your audio mixing in your particular speaker setup. Often times trying to play audio meant for surround systems (5.1, 7.1, etc) on stereo channels results in a poor audio mix.
- thfuran 5y ago
  And Netflix in particular seems to love defaulting to 5.1 tracks when it shouldn't.
  - ncpa-cpl 5y ago
    Diney Plus too
  - acchow 5y ago
    I don't even see an option to manually select a stereo track anymore. They seem to have removed it from my Smart TV's app.
    - thfuran 5y ago
      I don't think I've yet encountered something with an English 5.1 track that doesn't also have an English stereo track mixed in with whatever foreign language tracks are present but who knows what features any given app has.
robocat 5y ago
a way to remove the mood music and leave the voices and foley. I really enjoyed the cinematography of a film the other day, but the music completely ruined it.

FredPret 5y ago

It would be hilarious to see famous actors deepfaked into speaking foreign languages in a feature film. I suspect it simply won't work - translating accurately is really hard, but translating elegantly is frequently impossible. Some things are just easier/punchier/funnier to say in language A than B

spc476 5y ago
Laurel and Hardy would refilm many of their shorts in different languages, where they were speaking the foreign language. I always thought that was pretty cool.
Dracophoenix 5y ago
Already the case with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson speaking in German. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9613749/AI-company-uses-deepfake-technology-seamlessly-dub-favorite-actors-dialogue.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9613749/AI-c...

dheera 5y ago

Totally agree, I often much prefer subtitles to dubbing as I can hear the original voice artist's tone of expression as it was intended to be. Also, languages are bridges, not barriers, by exposing yourself more to another language you will learn it if you don't reject it.

throwaway675309 5y ago
That's a cute sentiment but there is no evidence that merely being exposed to a foreign language necessarily allows you to learn that language. I think you're confusing the movie 13th Warrior for reality. I have friends who religiously watch subtitled anime only and they are no closer to learning Japanese in any real sense of the word than a person who would watch the dubs, except for picking up a stray random word here or there, but knowing that kawaii means "cute" doesn't give you even a superficial understanding of Japanese. For that, you need to at least pick up hiragana and katakana. Learning a language requires deliberate work. There is no shortcut.
- ncpa-cpl 5y ago
  English and Japanese are very different. I speak Spanish. Subtitles have helped me a lot when languages are similar. I watched three seasons of a Catalan TV show subtitled in Spanish, and now I can follow conversations and read it. Before that I wasn't able to understand spoken Catalan. Some language pairs were this may work are: - Spanish/Catalan - Portuguese/Spanish - Dutch/German
- Izkata 5y ago
  Subtitles won't really help with sentence structure or conjugations, but it does help a lot with building vocabulary once you have the basics of sentence structure.
- dheera 5y ago
  > no evidence that merely being exposed to a foreign language necessarily allows you to learn that language Um, that's how babies learn, I think there is plenty of evidence in every baby on the planet. People stop learning this way when they start thinking of languages as barriers.

tompetry 5y ago

I am very surprised more people watched the dubbed version of Squid Game over the subtitles. I saw a friend watching the dubbed version and to me it didn't "preserve the original performances" as you say. Surprised subtitles are a barrier, I enjoy them personally, but I guess they have the data to know. I have tested out services that translate your "own voice" to another language and it was pretty cool, although I couldn't tell if the translation was quality. Automated translation isn't a solved problem, and this seems more of an issue than the tone of voice.

creakingstairs 5y ago
When I've moved to New Zealand, I was taken aback at how many people just could not stand subtitles. This and your mention about 'barrier' reminded me of Bong Joon Ho (director of Parasite) calling this out: "Once you overcome the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films."
- wumpus 5y ago
  ... and a well-deserved "Best Film" Oscar in the Academy awards, the first subtitled "foreign" film so awarded.
- derekp7 5y ago
  The problem I have with subtitles is the same reason I could never enjoy comics / graphic novels. I can either read and process the text, or look at / process the action (pictures). For me it is the same thing as trying to pay attention to two conference calls at the same time with a phone in each ear (is it just me that can't do this?). And it isn't just the mental processing, the rest of the screen sort of disappears from my perception when reading subtitles. Now silent films aren't a problem, as the text is shown before / after a given scene. So there is no processing two things at the same time. And it isn't a reading problem in general, because I'm an avid book reader and can consume books quite fast (although I only enjoy them if I read them slower and contemplate each scene).
  - 5y ago

starburst 5y ago

Another advantage is that you can eat your chips and still understand what's going on.

aaron695 5y ago

throwaway675309 5y ago

Then you're simply not thinking about it deeply enough. There are plenty of shows that someone may want to watch but may not be able to invest 100% of my attention watching that show, therefore with a show dubbed in their native language, they can still have the show in the background while being able to listen to the audio. With subtitles one has to constantly be looking at the actual show itself. Furthermore if one makes use picture in picture such as on a mobile platform or a tablet device the subtitles are so correspondingly small as to be basically hieroglyphic at that point.

distances 5y ago
This use case is totally foreign to me. If I can't concentrate, I stop the show and continue some other time. Someone wants to check their phone or visit the loo? Pause the show. Linear television is history after all. That said, other people can obviously have their own preferences. Just sounds so weird to me.

vagrantJin 5y ago

I watch a lot of foreign films and dubbed version misses a lot of nuance - complexity of spoken language, inflection, depth. So maybe I watch the kind of stuff where that kind of performace is required. Maybe it has certain genres or mediums where dubs work well like Romcoms or Marvel movies.

jack_pp 5y ago

It might seem to you but producers care about data and I do not find it hard to believe people prefer dubbing to subtitles. I believe most people prefer audio input to text because it requires far less of their attention. You would be surprised how many people watch / listen to shows while doing something else and thus not giving the show their full attention. I'm guilty of this with podcasts.

meheleventyone 5y ago
Maybe a system of always pandering to the lowest common denominator isn’t all it’s cracked up to be?
- jack_pp 5y ago
  That's the most profitable system. It certainly doesn't produce the most quality. Just like making a tool that lasts a lifetime is not as profitable as making something that breaks. Maybe crowdfunding media content is the way to go for quality but I can certainly understand how public companies make decisions in their search for infinite profits.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    > But I can certainly understand how public companies make decisions in their search for infinite profits. Well yes because it's not exactly novel or complex. My point isn't that there is no rationale it's whether we should just blindly go along with it.
    - jack_pp 5y ago
      Who is we? We the creators? We the consumers?
      - meheleventyone 5y ago
        We as wider society which is why I criticize the system rather than the players.

Someone 5y ago

I’m in the “pro subtitles” camp, too, but they too have disadvantages. By changing part of the screen, they don’t preserve the original performance, either (but IMO, that’s a lesser problem than dubbing) and their timing often is off. You’ll read a joke before or after it’s made, may know somebody gets shot before it happens, etc. I think aster readers will have a larger problem there. They (obviously) also work less well for slower readers.

southerntofu 5y ago

After a decade of training their model Youtube can't even produce meaningful subtitles for ordinary words in English (let alone my native language, french) and we're supposed to trust these fucked-up AI overlords are going to produce any better dubbing? I have no doubt these solutions will be popular, because many people have difficulty reading and will prefer audio when given the option. I'm just confident they won't reach any measurable quality and the translations will be full of non-sensical/anti-thetical statements.

pavelrub 5y ago

In my experience people who dislike subtitles are mostly native English speakers living in English-speaking countries, who are used to the fact that almost all the media they consume is produced in their native language, and so they’ve never developed the ability to read subtitles comfortably. When the occasional rare case arises where they need to watch a foreign film/show, they find it straining to both read the subtitles and watch the film, and so they conclude that subtitles are bad or “not for them”. In practice this stems from lack of practice — the perceived conscious effort of having to read subtitles while watching a film disappears entirely after you have done it a few times with sufficient regularity, and becomes completely effortless, subconscious, and automatic. But this is a skill that needs to be developed. Saying that subtitles are bad because they distract from the film is like saying that riding a bicycle is bad because you fall all the time, when in reality you just haven’t learned to ride one.