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I know Germany dub most video, but wouldn't a seven year old be able to read subtitles? It's a great way for her to learn English, it's how most Swedes learn it

I know Germany dub most video, but wouldn't a seven year old be able to read subtitles? It's a great way for her to learn English, it's how most Swedes learn it before starting school. I think there's a pretty strong correlation between countries' average English proficiency and how common dubbing is. https://haonowshaokao.com/2013/05/18/does-dubbing-tv-harm-language-learning/ https://haonowshaokao.com/2013/05/18/does-dubbing-tv-harm-la... Edit: I forgot to mention that the samples on the website is impressive and well made. How do you do the speaker diarization and voice cloning?

poulsbohemian 3y ago
>I know Germany dub most video, but wouldn't a seven year old be able to read subtitles? I gotta say... while sometimes it is a necessarily evil, I would so rather not have to read subtitles. I often want to listen to a show so that I can also continue working on catching up on email, etc, IE: I can't read two things at once, but I can listen to one thing and continue working on something else.
supafastcoder 3y ago
I think it’s a cultural difference. I’m also from a non-dubbing country (Netherlands) and I can’t stand dubbed content either. On the other hand people tell me they can’t stand subtitles because it “reveals” what they’re going to say before they say it.
- lukan 3y ago
  "people tell me they can’t stand subtitles because it “reveals” what they’re going to say before they say it." I love watching movies in the original language, but this is something I hate as well, but something that can be avoided. Some movies get it right, though. The timing, just the words that are spoken and even different colors for different persons speaking (very rare, cannot even remember where I have seen it). That should be standard, but with most movies you can be lucky if the subs even match the plot and do not reveal too much.
  - crtasm 3y ago
    >different colors for different persons speaking BBC iPlayer does this for some content, I don't know if it's ever on movies though.
    - masfuerte 3y ago
      It is. The iPlayer subtitles for Citizen Kane use colour to distinguish speakers.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    Some of the best subtitles I've ever seen were on Tom Scott's YouTube channel. They use different colours, indicators for jokes and sarcasm, while also staying relatively close to what's actually been said. They're better than many big-budget movies and TV shows I've seen. He talked about subtitling at some point, and I was surprised how cheap subtitling services are. I think he went beyond the price he mentioned, but it really made me question why big, profitable YouTube channels aren't spending the small change to do at least native language subtitles that Google can translate, instead of relying on YouTube's terrible algorithm That said, Whisper seems to generate quite good subtitles that take short pauses for timing into account, but they're obviously neve going to be as good as a human that actually understands the context of what's being said.
    - thylacine222 3y ago
      Whisper can also generate timings at the word level, which you could use to make better-timed subtitles
      - leobg 3y ago
        Yes. But Whisper's word-level timings are actually quite inaccurate out of the box. There are some Python libraries that mitigate that. I tested several of them. whisper-timestamped seems to be the best one. [0] [0] https://github.com/linto-ai/whisper-timestamped https://github.com/linto-ai/whisper-timestamped
  - 3y ago
- alexdbird 3y ago
  I prefer subs over dubbing for foreign languages, but I cannot stand closed captions (for people who can’t hear at all) because having your eye drawn to the bottom of the screen for a description of something I don’t need to know about is horrible!
  - vidarh 3y ago
    Sometimes it's hilarious when they're trying to describe the dramatic tension from sounds or music, and "reveal" all the cliches, though. "Music swells to a tear-jerking crescendo"
- matsemann 3y ago
  I think you get used to it. Like a punchline I've read, but I don't "register" it until the proper thing happens on the screen.
- vidarh 3y ago
  I'm Norwegian, and Norway used to be near-universally non-dubbing other than for TV for the very youngest children, and even then almost exclusively cartoons or stop motion etc. where it wasn't so jarring. But the target age of material being dubbed has crept up as it has become relatively-speaking cheaper to do compared to revenues generated in what is a tiny market. The thing that annoys me the most about it is that it often alters the feel of the material. E.g. I watched Valiant (2005) with my son in Norwegian first, because he got it on DVD from his grandparents. He doesn't understand much Norwegian, but when he first got the DVD he was so little that it didn't matter. A few years later we watched the English language version. It comes across as much darker in the English version. The voice acting is much more somber than the relatively cheerful way the Norwegian dub was done, and it while it's still a comedy, in comparison it feels like the Norwegian version obscures a lot of the tension, and it makes it feel almost like a different movie. I guess that could go both ways, but it does often feel like the people dubbing something are likely to have less time and opportunity to get direction on how to play the part, and you can often hear the consequences.
wodenokoto 3y ago
> but wouldn't a seven year old be able to read subtitles? No, they wouldn't. I don't believe that most swedes learn English by reading subtitles before starting school. > I think there's a pretty strong correlation between countries' average English proficiency and how common dubbing is. That I agree with.
- NicoJuicy 3y ago
  Most people in Belgium learn English through that before school. Why wouldn't swedes?
  - wodenokoto 3y ago
    You are saying that _most_ kids in Belgium can read subtitles before they start school? It took me several years of school before being able to read fast enough to follow along subtitles, and the same for everyone I know.
    - Freak_NL 3y ago
      They probably meant before they start learning English in primary school, not before they start school. This used to be the case in the Netherlands too; I picked up a significant body of English from British TV series watched with subtitles as kid. Nowadays this advantage will probably be missed by most children, because the streaming services offer a lot of dubbed content, and you get to pick what you watch unless someone guides you. Subtitles can be avoided for longer.
    - NicoJuicy 3y ago
      I think you're native English and have the associated bias concerning how it works in practice? Since kids first learn their native language ( write, read and speak) in school and only years after then ( mostly), learn foreign languages. When they learned to do it in their native language, they hear English spoken on tv with eg. Dutch subtitles and pick it up. Sometimes before they have English lessons. Most kids, as such, know a fair amount of English before they have it ( = English) in school. The Dutch subtitles isn't always a requirement though. Kids will pick it up in some shows, eg. Pokemon would be a good example if English spoken.
darkwater 3y ago
A 7yo can barely keep up with subtitles in their mother tongue, depending on the speed. And that's probably true for a p90 reader. A p50 there is no way it can follow subs understanding what they say. Now, being a video, they might be able to interpolate from what they see, so it might be a nice challenge. But doing this with subtitles in a foreign language is only for a few, privileged minds. Source: father of a 8yo with VERY good reading skills (already reading books in 2 languages targeted at tweens)
leobg 3y ago
Yeah, this isn't really helpful for her to learn English. This is more when we watch The Anatomy Lab, or BBC's "The Incredible Human Journey". She'll already be asking me a lot of questions about the content. So if I had to translate on top of that, it would be tedious. Subtitles - those are actually being generated as well. I've generated SRT files during development. Color coded by speaker, and on a per-word basis, for me to get the timing right. Basically, if you have a YouTube channel, you can take any video from your channel, run it through Speakz.ai, and you'll get 15+ additional audio tracks in different languages, plus 15+ subtitle files (SRT). Voice cloning and speaker diarization was a bit of a challenge. On the one hand, I want to duplicate the voice that is being spoken right now. On the other hand, sometimes "right now" is just a short "Yeah" (like in the Elon interview) which doesn't give you a lot of "meat" to work with in terms of embedding the voice's characteristics. Right now, I'm using a mix of signals: - Is the utterance padded by pauses before/after? - Is the utterance a complete sentence? - Does the voice of the utterance sound significantly different from the voice of the previous utterance? It's a deep, deep rabbit hole. I was tempted to go much deeper. But I thought I better check if anybody besides myself actually cares before I do that... :)
ChemSpider 3y ago
Dubbing in Germany is horrible and pervasive. Even in the news and interviews. Subtitles are cheaper and better. As others have said, it is better to expose kids (that can read) to the original language plus subtitles. So in other words, your solution while technically great is pedagogical not wise. A typical geek approach to a problem ;)
- rob74 3y ago
  The worst thing about dubbing is that it's more important for the translations to have roughly the same length and correspondence to the original mouth movements than to be accurate. So the original meaning is often altered, and you don't even know it because of course you have no easy access to the original most of the time. But unfortunately Germans are so used to dubbing that subtitles don't really stand a chance. There are a few cinemas here and there that show original-language movies with subtitles, and on TV there was one experiment that I'm aware of a few years ago (on Pro Sieben Maxx) to show TV series with subtitles, but it was cancelled after some time. AFAIK it's also more expensive to secure the rights to show English-language content compared to dubbed content.

poulsbohemian 3y ago

>I know Germany dub most video, but wouldn't a seven year old be able to read subtitles? I gotta say... while sometimes it is a necessarily evil, I would so rather not have to read subtitles. I often want to listen to a show so that I can also continue working on catching up on email, etc, IE: I can't read two things at once, but I can listen to one thing and continue working on something else.

supafastcoder 3y ago

I think it’s a cultural difference. I’m also from a non-dubbing country (Netherlands) and I can’t stand dubbed content either. On the other hand people tell me they can’t stand subtitles because it “reveals” what they’re going to say before they say it.

lukan 3y ago
"people tell me they can’t stand subtitles because it “reveals” what they’re going to say before they say it." I love watching movies in the original language, but this is something I hate as well, but something that can be avoided. Some movies get it right, though. The timing, just the words that are spoken and even different colors for different persons speaking (very rare, cannot even remember where I have seen it). That should be standard, but with most movies you can be lucky if the subs even match the plot and do not reveal too much.
- crtasm 3y ago
  >different colors for different persons speaking BBC iPlayer does this for some content, I don't know if it's ever on movies though.
  - masfuerte 3y ago
    It is. The iPlayer subtitles for Citizen Kane use colour to distinguish speakers.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  Some of the best subtitles I've ever seen were on Tom Scott's YouTube channel. They use different colours, indicators for jokes and sarcasm, while also staying relatively close to what's actually been said. They're better than many big-budget movies and TV shows I've seen. He talked about subtitling at some point, and I was surprised how cheap subtitling services are. I think he went beyond the price he mentioned, but it really made me question why big, profitable YouTube channels aren't spending the small change to do at least native language subtitles that Google can translate, instead of relying on YouTube's terrible algorithm That said, Whisper seems to generate quite good subtitles that take short pauses for timing into account, but they're obviously neve going to be as good as a human that actually understands the context of what's being said.
  - thylacine222 3y ago
    Whisper can also generate timings at the word level, which you could use to make better-timed subtitles
    - leobg 3y ago
      Yes. But Whisper's word-level timings are actually quite inaccurate out of the box. There are some Python libraries that mitigate that. I tested several of them. whisper-timestamped seems to be the best one. [0] [0] https://github.com/linto-ai/whisper-timestamped https://github.com/linto-ai/whisper-timestamped
- 3y ago
alexdbird 3y ago
I prefer subs over dubbing for foreign languages, but I cannot stand closed captions (for people who can’t hear at all) because having your eye drawn to the bottom of the screen for a description of something I don’t need to know about is horrible!
- vidarh 3y ago
  Sometimes it's hilarious when they're trying to describe the dramatic tension from sounds or music, and "reveal" all the cliches, though. "Music swells to a tear-jerking crescendo"
matsemann 3y ago
I think you get used to it. Like a punchline I've read, but I don't "register" it until the proper thing happens on the screen.
vidarh 3y ago
I'm Norwegian, and Norway used to be near-universally non-dubbing other than for TV for the very youngest children, and even then almost exclusively cartoons or stop motion etc. where it wasn't so jarring. But the target age of material being dubbed has crept up as it has become relatively-speaking cheaper to do compared to revenues generated in what is a tiny market. The thing that annoys me the most about it is that it often alters the feel of the material. E.g. I watched Valiant (2005) with my son in Norwegian first, because he got it on DVD from his grandparents. He doesn't understand much Norwegian, but when he first got the DVD he was so little that it didn't matter. A few years later we watched the English language version. It comes across as much darker in the English version. The voice acting is much more somber than the relatively cheerful way the Norwegian dub was done, and it while it's still a comedy, in comparison it feels like the Norwegian version obscures a lot of the tension, and it makes it feel almost like a different movie. I guess that could go both ways, but it does often feel like the people dubbing something are likely to have less time and opportunity to get direction on how to play the part, and you can often hear the consequences.

wodenokoto 3y ago

> but wouldn't a seven year old be able to read subtitles? No, they wouldn't. I don't believe that most swedes learn English by reading subtitles before starting school. > I think there's a pretty strong correlation between countries' average English proficiency and how common dubbing is. That I agree with.

NicoJuicy 3y ago
Most people in Belgium learn English through that before school. Why wouldn't swedes?
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  You are saying that _most_ kids in Belgium can read subtitles before they start school? It took me several years of school before being able to read fast enough to follow along subtitles, and the same for everyone I know.
  - Freak_NL 3y ago
    They probably meant before they start learning English in primary school, not before they start school. This used to be the case in the Netherlands too; I picked up a significant body of English from British TV series watched with subtitles as kid. Nowadays this advantage will probably be missed by most children, because the streaming services offer a lot of dubbed content, and you get to pick what you watch unless someone guides you. Subtitles can be avoided for longer.
  - NicoJuicy 3y ago
    I think you're native English and have the associated bias concerning how it works in practice? Since kids first learn their native language ( write, read and speak) in school and only years after then ( mostly), learn foreign languages. When they learned to do it in their native language, they hear English spoken on tv with eg. Dutch subtitles and pick it up. Sometimes before they have English lessons. Most kids, as such, know a fair amount of English before they have it ( = English) in school. The Dutch subtitles isn't always a requirement though. Kids will pick it up in some shows, eg. Pokemon would be a good example if English spoken.

darkwater 3y ago

A 7yo can barely keep up with subtitles in their mother tongue, depending on the speed. And that's probably true for a p90 reader. A p50 there is no way it can follow subs understanding what they say. Now, being a video, they might be able to interpolate from what they see, so it might be a nice challenge. But doing this with subtitles in a foreign language is only for a few, privileged minds. Source: father of a 8yo with VERY good reading skills (already reading books in 2 languages targeted at tweens)

leobg 3y ago

Yeah, this isn't really helpful for her to learn English. This is more when we watch The Anatomy Lab, or BBC's "The Incredible Human Journey". She'll already be asking me a lot of questions about the content. So if I had to translate on top of that, it would be tedious. Subtitles - those are actually being generated as well. I've generated SRT files during development. Color coded by speaker, and on a per-word basis, for me to get the timing right. Basically, if you have a YouTube channel, you can take any video from your channel, run it through Speakz.ai, and you'll get 15+ additional audio tracks in different languages, plus 15+ subtitle files (SRT). Voice cloning and speaker diarization was a bit of a challenge. On the one hand, I want to duplicate the voice that is being spoken right now. On the other hand, sometimes "right now" is just a short "Yeah" (like in the Elon interview) which doesn't give you a lot of "meat" to work with in terms of embedding the voice's characteristics. Right now, I'm using a mix of signals: - Is the utterance padded by pauses before/after? - Is the utterance a complete sentence? - Does the voice of the utterance sound significantly different from the voice of the previous utterance? It's a deep, deep rabbit hole. I was tempted to go much deeper. But I thought I better check if anybody besides myself actually cares before I do that... :)

ChemSpider 3y ago

Dubbing in Germany is horrible and pervasive. Even in the news and interviews. Subtitles are cheaper and better. As others have said, it is better to expose kids (that can read) to the original language plus subtitles. So in other words, your solution while technically great is pedagogical not wise. A typical geek approach to a problem ;)

rob74 3y ago
The worst thing about dubbing is that it's more important for the translations to have roughly the same length and correspondence to the original mouth movements than to be accurate. So the original meaning is often altered, and you don't even know it because of course you have no easy access to the original most of the time. But unfortunately Germans are so used to dubbing that subtitles don't really stand a chance. There are a few cinemas here and there that show original-language movies with subtitles, and on TV there was one experiment that I'm aware of a few years ago (on Pro Sieben Maxx) to show TV series with subtitles, but it was cancelled after some time. AFAIK it's also more expensive to secure the rights to show English-language content compared to dubbed content.