some excerpts I thought this part was interesting:
some excerpts
It’s also costlier to produce a dub, which means a dubbed film or series can take considerably longer to produce and distribute overseas, though this process has sped up thanks to technological advances. For instance, in 1997, the dubbing process alone for a film took around six to eight weeks; these days, Netflix demands dubbing turnaround times of mere days. But, of course, that’s all assuming the film even gets dubbed in your language to begin with.
If you’re an anime fan, the topic of subs and dubs is even more complicated. Between the 1960s and the mid-2000s, many anime series were inaccessible overseas unless they were translated and distributed by fans, usually illegally. The rare exception was when a popular anime would make it to international TV networks, like Sailor Moon or Dragon Ball Z. In countries where anime is an export, these TV runs were nearly always in dubbed format, with no subtitles.
I thought this part was interesting:
Spanish censorship boards, founded in the late ’30s and exacerbated under Francisco Franco’s regime, required that, starting in 1941, all foreign films had to be dubbed into Spanish. The rise in dubbing coincided with a number of censorship changes to make the films more palatable with perceived Spanish cultural values. This ban on subtitled films remained in place until 1967, but its impact can still be felt today.
Likewise, in occupied countries where the Nazi regime required all films to be dubbed into German during WWII, dubbing remains the most common form of non-native-language film viewing, and the German dubbing market is still the largest globally. The 2018 book Introducing Translational Studies reports that “Austria is the country with the highest rejection rate (more than 70 percent) of subtitles, followed by Italy, Spain, and Germany.” And dubbing is still being used today in places like Quebec to promote political agendas, as writer Julian Leu observes in his recent pro-subtitle breakdown of the role of nationalism in the debate.
Something else that complicates things with subs vs. dubs with anime in the west is that for many years it was common for the studios performing English localization to play extremely fast and...
Something else that complicates things with subs vs. dubs with anime in the west is that for many years it was common for the studios performing English localization to play extremely fast and loose, editing out segments, cutting episodes, rewriting characters, making changes to animation, and in some cases throwing almost everything out and recutting a show into an entirely different series with a new story.
This left a bad taste not only in the mouths of fans (who were keenly aware of the changes thanks to fansubs), but also in those of creators in Japan. The first English dub of Nausicaa Valley of the Wind was one such dub, which was so bad (20m of runtime removed, recut into a generic action-adventure with no message) that Studio Ghibli refused to license English dubs for a decade.
This history influences a lot of the polarization on the subject in the anime fandom even today, a good 15-20 years after aggressively bad localizations went extinct.
There are a lot of anime sub>dub purists that I think have lost the plot a bit. If you like the voice actors better or whatever sure, but the primary reason for the preference has all but...
There are a lot of anime sub>dub purists that I think have lost the plot a bit. If you like the voice actors better or whatever sure, but the primary reason for the preference has all but disappeared. They don't really do re-edits of shows anymore like happened with Sailor Moon or Nausicaa, or crazy extensive ones like Robotech, unless it's intentional like Ghost Story.
The original voice acting is better in most cases. Besides, for a lot of people, Japanese is the language that makes sense for anime. That is much in the same way that one might prefer their opera...
The original voice acting is better in most cases. Besides, for a lot of people, Japanese is the language that makes sense for anime. That is much in the same way that one might prefer their opera in Italian, or their metal music in English. I wouldn't call that being a "purist", it is just an aesthetic preference built over time. Japanese just "sounds right" to some people.
There is a lot of fairly well regarded opera in german, same for metal and sweedish and other languages. I can only speak for older spanish dubs, but for me the bigger issues with anime dubs in...
There is a lot of fairly well regarded opera in german, same for metal and sweedish and other languages. I can only speak for older spanish dubs, but for me the bigger issues with anime dubs in particular are:
The overall quality is worse. Dubs feel dubbed over in a way original japanese dubs do not.
Same voices over and over. Not sure about the US, but in Spain most dubs have the same small group of voice actors, doing the same voices over and over. This is a problem in non-anime dubs too, but it is very noticeable in anime.
Spanish voice actors do not shout or emote much. I remember fighting sequences in dragon ball with long, monotone "eeaaaaaaaa eeaaaaaaaaa eeaaaaaaaaa" voice lines. No running out of air, no anger, nothing.
Another thing that I see a lot is people complaining that some nuance of japanese is lost in translation. Things like (some) honorifics and set phrases. People want to hear "senpai", "oniichan", et al in their anime. I'm kind of torn on this because while I think the honor dynamics are indeed lost in translation unless you clumsily add them to the english version (via adding the words or reworking the dialog), hearing someone say "oniichan wouldn't do that!" is firgernails-on-chalkboard horrible.
As you eloquently put, there are many nuances to this discussion for sure. I didn't mean to say that opera is only good in Italian, or that metal music is only good in English. I was just trying...
As you eloquently put, there are many nuances to this discussion for sure.
I didn't mean to say that opera is only good in Italian, or that metal music is only good in English. I was just trying to express that some people do expect certain content to be in a specific language and that is a valid preference that I don't consider merely a purism.
My personal opinion on the issue of honorifics reflects my overall attitude towards anime and manga translation.
Maybe similarly to you, I generally dislike how fan translations of anime tend to be overly reverent to the source material. The purpose of translation is to transport meaning, but if you're too bound to transport everything at all times you end up with huge subs that are hard to read and footnotes that no one will pause for. I don't believe it is possible to translate honorifics well, but adding footnotes or simply keeping the Japanese words is even worse in my view. Ultimately, I prefer having fun, even if that means not transmitting every detail of Japanese culture.
I see. To be fair, when I first watched the original Avatar TLA I had an issue similar to what you describe. It was my first english speaking animated show in a while and at first my brain was...
I didn't mean to say that opera is only good in Italian, or that metal music is only good in English. I was just trying to express that some people do expect certain content to be in a specific language and that is a valid preference that I don't consider merely a purism.
I see. To be fair, when I first watched the original Avatar TLA I had an issue similar to what you describe. It was my first english speaking animated show in a while and at first my brain was very unhappy with how it looked anime-ish but sounded english, even if that was the original dub.
I had a similar experience when I was first watching Castlevania. I switched to the Japanese dub for a moment and found it quite good. However, the English dub is just marvelous. Which makes sense...
I had a similar experience when I was first watching Castlevania. I switched to the Japanese dub for a moment and found it quite good. However, the English dub is just marvelous. Which makes sense given that it is the original one -- it's the one overseen by the creators, with way more time and resources than localizations usually have. From a production perspective, it makes sense for the original dub to have have a superior quality in many cases.
I don't think this is a fair comparison, and I say this as someone who generally does prefer subs. Opera has a number of poetic factors at play that would be lost in translation, so translating an...
Japanese is the language that makes sense for anime. That is much in the same way that one might prefer their opera in Italian
I don't think this is a fair comparison, and I say this as someone who generally does prefer subs. Opera has a number of poetic factors at play that would be lost in translation, so translating an opera from the language it's originally written in would have much graver effects on the final product than any modern anime translations (dubs or otherwise). I'm with you that it's an aesthetic choice that some people (myself included) prefer, I just think comparing watching a dub to listening an Italian opera in English is an overreach.
This is not what I said, and I think it's quite silly to pretend as if it is. Opera (whether in Italian or any other language) both is set to music and is often poetry. This means things like "the...
Ultimately, I don't agree that opera in Italian is necessarily more unique and sophisticated than any other art, and that includes anime.
This is not what I said, and I think it's quite silly to pretend as if it is. Opera (whether in Italian or any other language) both is set to music and is often poetry. This means things like "the words have to line up with the music" and other poetic concerns like meter and rhyme are often considerations. These things are not issues when translating something that is neither music nor poetry, which is the vast majority of anime. Translating music and poetry is more difficult generally than normal dialogue -- the same is true for translating Japanese songs into English for anime, for instance, which is more difficult and is done less often.
I already said I watch most of my anime subbed so I don't really need the lecture on "the richness, sophistication, and uniqueness of voice acting in Japanese". I'm just saying that translating normal dialogue in an anime is very different from translating music or poetry, and thus the comparison to opera falls flat.
There is definitive rhythm and other concerns with just dialogue. Like a sentence that might take 5 seconds to say in Japanese, could in some cases need 6 seconds to get the same meaning in...
There is definitive rhythm and other concerns with just dialogue. Like a sentence that might take 5 seconds to say in Japanese, could in some cases need 6 seconds to get the same meaning in another language. Making the translator forced to make the sentence shorter or have the dubber speak faster. Both of which can alter the perception of the dialogue and subtle nuances. And whether one sees those changes as have a great effect or not is pretty much subjective, and could apply to opera just as well as anime dubs depending on what one finds important with either of these.
Oh yeah I'm not trying to downplay that issues like this exist in dubbing! They definitely do, as you describe. But all these issues that are present in dubbing dialogue are dialed up to 11 when...
Oh yeah I'm not trying to downplay that issues like this exist in dubbing! They definitely do, as you describe. But all these issues that are present in dubbing dialogue are dialed up to 11 when it comes to music -- there are definitely people who watch mostly dubbed anime but dislike when yhe Japanese music in an OP is translated, for instance, because it exacerbates problems that are easier for them to overlook (and for translators to compensate for). And poetry, written or spoken, adds a HUGE number of components that almost always either hugely complicate the translation process or must be ignored (and thus lost). Think of how difficult translating something like The Cat and the Hat into another language would be -- unless you got quite lucky with the rhymes in the target language, you inevitably have a lot of very hard choices to make in translating it because of its poetic nature. And that's a deliberately simple poem at that! I can't imagine how difficult those choices are for someone translating something like The Iliad, with much more historical and cultural baggage resting on it.
I don't intend to say these are completely unrelated problems to those encountered in normal translation of dialogue and such! I just want to emphasize the degree to which music and poetry increase the difficulty for a translator in actually capturing as much of the original as possible in a translation. I think it does a disservice to the hard work of translating works with these particular elements. Translation is difficult more generally as well, but going for poetry or music really is "hard mode" in many respects, and that can naturally influence one's experience and preference for the final result. This can even vary within anime based on the subject-matter -- I don't think the dub of Death Note takes much away from a viewer's experience (despite preferring the Japanese voice acting myself), but I'm not even sure it would be possible to dub something like Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju.
Of course, but it’s easy to see how someone who had an experience (or multiple) with bad dubs/localizations years ago and hasn’t watched any dubs since then might still carry a distaste. For me it...
Of course, but it’s easy to see how someone who had an experience (or multiple) with bad dubs/localizations years ago and hasn’t watched any dubs since then might still carry a distaste.
For me it comes down to the quality of casting and direction (a lot of dubs still phone these in) and the context of the show/movie — English dubs can feel a bit weird in a show set in Japan compared to one that takes place in a setting that’s e.g. western inspired or without strong cultural associations like space.
Robotech isn't an anime series. Or rather it's three anime with similar styles that were smooshed together to make Robotech. It's both impressive and insane that they actually managed to make a...
Robotech isn't an anime series. Or rather it's three anime with similar styles that were smooshed together to make Robotech. It's both impressive and insane that they actually managed to make a more or less cohesive story by editing the different shows and making it take place over 'generations'.
To be fair to the people who put Robotech together, the other shows they stitched together were not entirely unrelated. They were spin-offs of the original series. It’s still full of egregious...
To be fair to the people who put Robotech together, the other shows they stitched together were not entirely unrelated. They were spin-offs of the original series. It’s still full of egregious changes but it could have been worse.
Well, there was this show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotech that was made by smashing together three giant robot anime, watching them with the sound off, then writing a script. (At least they...
that was made by smashing together three giant robot anime, watching them with the sound off, then writing a script. (At least they trashed Macross but left Gundam alone) Then there was Cardcaptors which edited away almost half of the brilliant Cardcaptor Sakura because they didn't think an American audience could handle a female protagonist. (I think they did leave the episode where she wears a rubber dress though!)
Something funny though is that many of the American voice actors that we bitterly complained about early on stuck with it and "got good". Japanese video games frequently have English voices as good as the Japanese. I can't make up my mind if Melissa Fahn plays Neptune as well as the Japanese actress and that's saying something because her Japanese actress is Tanaka Rie.
I'm not in the field, but I think there has to be something cultural among American translators that causes this. I recently saw a discussion of a few really good local (non-english speaking...
I'm not in the field, but I think there has to be something cultural among American translators that causes this.
I recently saw a discussion of a few really good local (non-english speaking country) book translators who are apparently all aware that Americans tend to take too many liberties with translating foreign books to a degree that would likely cause a scandal where I live. Being from a small non-english speaking country, a portion of foreign non-english books sold here is done as foreign language -> English -> local language re-translations because it's cheaper, and most book enthusiasts know it's good to avoid those not because two translation steps are necessarily a problem in general, but because specifically the English translation in the middle means you may be reading a slightly different book.
This also happens with videogames, so it seems to be a different approach to translation in general and I wonder where it came from.
Commonly seen in subtitles of "Netflix Original" anime over 2023: Character: "Hai" Subtitle text: "Why, yes, I'm doing well, and how are you on this beautiful sunny day?" Sometimes the subs are...
Commonly seen in subtitles of "Netflix Original" anime over 2023:
Character: "Hai"
Subtitle text: "Why, yes, I'm doing well, and how are you on this beautiful sunny day?"
Sometimes the subs are not super accurate to put it mildly.
Usually when I’ve seen this happen it’s because the english subs are actually “dubtitles”, where in place of subtitles they’ve used closed captioning from the dub. It’s frustrating because though...
Usually when I’ve seen this happen it’s because the english subs are actually “dubtitles”, where in place of subtitles they’ve used closed captioning from the dub.
It’s frustrating because though dubtitles are technically functional, they’re lazy/cheap. Subtitles aren’t subject to the same problems/limitations as dubs (e.g. they don’t need to match lip flapping) and have the opportunity to be more direct and less localized, and so should be separate from closed captioning.
It makes it sound less of a "debate" and more of a "the powerful like to use dubbing for sneaky propaganda and censorship" which I feel is comparable to "debating" the shape of the Earth....
It makes it sound less of a "debate" and more of a "the powerful like to use dubbing for sneaky propaganda and censorship" which I feel is comparable to "debating" the shape of the Earth. Technically you can put 2 people in a room and make them argue, sure, but one of them is rare, and either not sincere or not sane, and in the end, reality doesn't care about their opinions. Inclusion of subtitles you can turn on or off should be legally mandated specifically to undermine such abuses, and of course help HOH and other people with auditory processing issues.
Inclusion of dubbing or not could then be a debate.
Does it really? I don't think it's controversial to say that the use of dubbing is often political because a lot of non-English countries use dubbing to try to "preserve" their native language and...
It makes it sound less of a "debate" and more of a "the powerful like to use dubbing for sneaky propaganda and censorship" which I feel is comparable to "debating" the shape of the Earth.
Does it really? I don't think it's controversial to say that the use of dubbing is often political because a lot of non-English countries use dubbing to try to "preserve" their native language and a lot of debate ensues around this.
Also this is only a small part of the article, if you read it the article goes into a lot of detail on the history of dubbing.
I hate to repeat myself, but "Inclusion of subtitles you can turn on or off", "undermine (...) abuses". You do not refer to it at all. You are talking about "Inclusion of dubbing or not could then...
I hate to repeat myself, but "Inclusion of subtitles you can turn on or off", "undermine (...) abuses". You do not refer to it at all.
You are talking about "Inclusion of dubbing or not could then be a debate." And I didn't really made any comments on that.
When you say "undermine (...) abuses" I don't think the article is arguing (and I am certainly not arguing) that dubbing is somehow being used to nefariously indoctrinate people with propaganda;...
When you say "undermine (...) abuses" I don't think the article is arguing (and I am certainly not arguing) that dubbing is somehow being used to nefariously indoctrinate people with propaganda; the argument is that dubbing is popular among nativist politicians who see it as a way to further their own language above others.
Inclusion of subtitles you can turn on or off should be legally mandated specifically to undermine such abuses, and of course help HOH and other people with auditory processing issues.
Subtitles are a legal requirement for broadcast media in many countries, including the UK and US.
It's interesting that culture and history play such a big part in dubbing. As a Chinese language learner, I'm often extremely frustrated by the lack of mandarin dubs available in streaming...
It's interesting that culture and history play such a big part in dubbing. As a Chinese language learner, I'm often extremely frustrated by the lack of mandarin dubs available in streaming services, such and Netflix and Amazon. It seems there's a Spanish or German dub on absolutely everything, but rarely a mandarin dub. When there is, it's almost exclusively reserved for cartoons and family films.
This has always surprised me because Chinese is the second most spoken language on Earth. I always put it down to the fact that most Chinese speakers live behind the great firewall and it probably isn't worth it for streaming services to create dubs in Chinese. However, what does baffle me is that there are plenty of films that I know for a fact have official/good dubs in Chinese because I've watched them before in that dub, but can't find them anywhere on streaming services. Plenty of Disney films have official Chinese dubs but aren't listed on Disney+, which I just can't understand. Perhaps it's because there just isn't a culture for it in Chinese speaking people.
When I lived in Taiwan, Taiwanese Netflix had plenty of media dubbed in Chinese. Moving back to the UK, most of this had been removed. I can't understand this. If Netflix already owns the dubbing, it can't cost that much more to run that dubbing in multiple regions, can it?
What language is your Netflix? It may have changed but at one point it wouldn’t list all the subs and dubs available, it would just give a generic list of them. Changing the language setting in...
What language is your Netflix? It may have changed but at one point it wouldn’t list all the subs and dubs available, it would just give a generic list of them. Changing the language setting in Netflix to the language I needed dubs and subs for would make that language show up. It also seems to bump Netflix-made content from countries with that language up in the recommendations.
And the website and apps have gotten so much worse for browsing over the decades but it might still be possible to search by audio.
This is absolutely true -- my wife is constantly frustrated because she wants to show me Norwegian dubs of kid's movies, but they're not available for us to select here in Germany for all films...
This is absolutely true -- my wife is constantly frustrated because she wants to show me Norwegian dubs of kid's movies, but they're not available for us to select here in Germany for all films (it's inconsistent yay).
That said, some languages do just get dubs more often than others more generally. Germans LOVE their dubs, so more movies get dubbed in the first place. I don't think dubs into Chinese are nearly as common (especially since Chinese TV often has baked-in subs anyway, so I wager they're culturally more used to subs in general), especially for non-children's films.
This is probably a licensing issue. Probably also to keep people from buying international accounts. ... Also different regions might have different laws and some sections might need to be deleted...
I can't understand this. If Netflix already owns the dubbing, it can't cost that much more to run that dubbing in multiple regions, can it?
This is probably a licensing issue. Probably also to keep people from buying international accounts.
... Also different regions might have different laws and some sections might need to be deleted or rephrased to avoid censorship / different age ratings.
It may be a licensing issue sometimes, but I don't think it is universally. Netflix originals are a good test case here -- they usually do have more language options for a given region than...
It may be a licensing issue sometimes, but I don't think it is universally. Netflix originals are a good test case here -- they usually do have more language options for a given region than non-Netflix originals, but they definitely don't display all of their options for audio or subtitles last I checked. They tend to limit it to a set of languages common in your region regardless I think. For instance, I live in Germany, and neither my sub or dub options for Glass Onion include Spanish, but I'm certain one or both exist and would be accessible if I were in a different country.
... turning it around the other way I have been amazed at how stupendously bad English subtitles are for Chinese titles such as the (fantastic!)...
... turning it around the other way I have been amazed at how stupendously bad English subtitles are for Chinese titles such as the (fantastic!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Kingdoms_(TV_series) I was pretty mad that I got a copy of Investiture of the Gods that was advertised to have English subtitles but it didn't... And it looks really good.
I’ve definitely seen horrible subtitles for Chinese media before. But it’s not only Chinese media, it’s anything where there isn’t much interest in English speaking countries for whatever reason...
I’ve definitely seen horrible subtitles for Chinese media before. But it’s not only Chinese media, it’s anything where there isn’t much interest in English speaking countries for whatever reason (and it rarely matters how good the show is). I even saw it when some of the less famous Steven Chow comedies started coming to Netflix. But in those cases there almost certainly is no English dub, so it really comes down to there simply not being a good translation for the material because the people releasing that version were not willing to invest in it. Which is something of a shame because it seems like such a small investment for something that will presumably make it back many times over.
As a side note many Chinese movies have post-dubbed dialogue, so it seems like something of a missed opportunity to not have localized dubbing for them. The lips never quite matched in the first place.
Let me point out that neither subtitles nor dubs have an intrinsic advantage in fidelity to the source material. I've been a long-time viewer of films in languages other than English. [Overall,...
Let me point out that neither subtitles nor dubs have an intrinsic advantage in fidelity to the source material.
I've been a long-time viewer of films in languages other than English. [Overall, the foreign movies and TV productions that make it to the States have already been filtered against Sturgeon's Law, and I'm more likely to enjoy them than any random example of Hollywood product.] I have just enough fluency in German that I know when subtitles or dubbing have omitted part of the dialogue, lost nuance, or been inaccurate. For example, I've watched both subtitled and dubbed versions of Das Boot. This is an unusual case, because the same actors gave the English-language voiceover performance, and it's not nearly as bad as typical dub quality. However, the same omissions were present, as if only one English script translation was used for both. Of note is that much of the more colorful language and salacious discussion was altered or censored for BBC and US broadcast requirements.
Spouse is partially deaf, so it's usual for us to watch subtitled English content as well, especially with the depreciation of sound recording quality in current productions. All the complaints about poor subtitling apply here - it's jarring to hear words and phrases that absolutely aren't in the subtitle text or are rendered incorrectly. I'd like the swearing to be undiluted by dumb euphemisms, please.
We all recognize the terrible quality of voiceover acting in most dubs (see Shaolin Fox Conspiracy for one of the funniest examples of over-the-top melodramatic reading). The sync problems between the actors' facial movements and the audio are very disruptive to immersion in the production, for me at least. I don't have examples, but I know that professional-quality AI is now being used to bridge this gap, and I'm curious to see the results. There are deepfake dangers when audiences have no means to tell if the content might have been modified.
If I was going to pay for a service or apply legal requirements, I'd like a link to a well-translated version of the original script for reference on every production.
I can't say I am good at Japanese at all but when I watch dubbed anime I find myself translating back common phrases back to Japanese (e.g. there's a reason why people in a translated anime always...
I can't say I am good at Japanese at all but when I watch dubbed anime I find myself translating back common phrases back to Japanese (e.g. there's a reason why people in a translated anime always say "Leave it to me!")
The first few chapters of an introductory Japanese book are covered pretty well in anime: they really do say "Daijobu Desu Ka?" as often as they do in Ranma 1/2 so it's not just that people in anime are getting injured all the time. When I lived in Germany I sometimes had the experience of being able to do a transaction at the bank or something that seemed to be ahead of my "book" knowledge but I've got the fear that if I went to Japan I might say something like "Let's transform and beat up the enemy"
I find myself doing this with some non-audio translations too, though less with specific phrases and more with certain styles of speech -- particularly in scenes that rely on characters not having...
when I watch dubbed anime I find myself translating back common phrases back to Japanese
I find myself doing this with some non-audio translations too, though less with specific phrases and more with certain styles of speech -- particularly in scenes that rely on characters not having information that was omitted in the Japanese text, but which would be much less natural to omit in the English text. I'm playing the 2nd Professor Layton game with my wife now and we recently came across just such a scene, where the translators clearly had to massage the sentences to avoid giving away something with the default English grammar that would not be given away in the default Japanese grammar. But then I didn't notice it (or at least didn't attribute it to translation) when I played the game as a kid, so I suppose it works!
I wonder how much of the passion in this debate comes from people who are afraid of the industry taking away the mode they're arguing for. In my mind, accessibility is the most important reason...
I wonder how much of the passion in this debate comes from people who are afraid of the industry taking away the mode they're arguing for. In my mind, accessibility is the most important reason that both should exist.
An accessibility talk I attended years ago pointed out that while we tend to think of permanent disability when we discuss accessibility, most of us will have some disability at some point in our lives. We might break a bone, get an ear infection, or get our eyes dilated. Even more short term and applicable to this, we might want to watch a movie without disturbing someone in the next room, or maybe to watch a movie on the bus, but the subtitles are too small to read.
There isn't a "better" between these two sides. There is what I need right now and what I might need tomorrow.
People declaring that others are lazy or dumb over this is just awful. That kind of self centered snobbery is far too common.
Watching English speaking movies dubbed in my language as a kid, I had no idea Americans could curse. When I started learning English, I realized subtitles did the same. The movies where "morality...
Watching English speaking movies dubbed in my language as a kid, I had no idea Americans could curse. When I started learning English, I realized subtitles did the same. The movies where "morality washed". The phrase "I'm gonna fuck you in the ass you dirty whore" became "I'm gonna kiss you gently, marry you and make a decent woman out of you ". Just a little exaggeration but you get the point. The Sopranos subs in my language on HBO make it suitable for 12-year-olds. It's a disgrace. This is certainly not a new issue and subtitles should (shocking!) reflect the original material even when they contain words we find offensive.
A lot of translators are like a dude desperately trying to make Lovecraft sound sunny and cheery.
In any case, at least with subtitles they keep the original content audio available for those who know the language.
Edit: in an interesting note, Schwarzenegger's voice acting in my language is actually a much better actor than Schwarzenegger, so in that case I much prefer the dub lol. But that's an extreme case!
Yes, subtitles are by no means either faithful or reliable in conveying the original meanings and intent. I only meant to say that in that case the original audio remains present for those who can...
Yes, subtitles are by no means either faithful or reliable in conveying the original meanings and intent. I only meant to say that in that case the original audio remains present for those who can understand it.
Very intersting! We used to have the same thing with Louis De Funès, where the voice actor made him into someone even funnier, and iirc even Funès himself gave him praise.
Edit: in an interesting note, Schwarzenegger's voice acting in my language is actually a much better actor than Schwarzenegger, so in that case I much prefer the dub lol. But that's an extreme case!
Very intersting! We used to have the same thing with Louis De Funès, where the voice actor made him into someone even funnier, and iirc even Funès himself gave him praise.
This whole debate is about to become irrelevant; we have AI technology today that can dub video in the original speaker’s own voice, and sync up the character’s lips to match. The result is so...
This whole debate is about to become irrelevant; we have AI technologytoday that can dub video in the original speaker’s own voice, and sync up the character’s lips to match. The result is so seamless you wouldn’t even know it was originally produced in a different language.
The tech is controversial, but it’s here and we’re only likely to see more of it in the coming years. Maybe people will still argue about dubbing vs. subtitles, but in my estimation both are going to be considered antiquated in short order.
While the relevant AI technology is impressive, I don't think it is yet to a point where it can entirely replace hiring voice actors to dub a work. And even if it were perfect, subtitles would...
While the relevant AI technology is impressive, I don't think it is yet to a point where it can entirely replace hiring voice actors to dub a work. And even if it were perfect, subtitles would still need to exist and I'm sure some fraction of people would prefer them regardless.
Agreed, emotion and intonation is the tricky part that I'm not sure AI can replicate as it can get really subtle. It really struck me when I saw Animaniacs! In Concert last fall, with Rob Paulsen...
Agreed, emotion and intonation is the tricky part that I'm not sure AI can replicate as it can get really subtle. It really struck me when I saw Animaniacs! In Concert last fall, with Rob Paulsen (Yakko) singing some of the songs. There was one about Dot that's super upbeat in tone and melody, but Yakko and Wakko have this edge of exasperation and despair when they sing their parts. It's almost contradictory, and I can't see AI being able to get that "upbeat but comedically upset" intonation without a lot of work and tweaking. Seems like it would be much easier and faster to direct a skilled voice actor and singer to get that sort of tone.
Obviously that's a very specific example, but I know some people who work in these industries are perfectionists. They can get VERY picky about line delivery, especially when musical numbers are involved. There are tales of lines being recorded multiple times until the director or actor is satisfied with the result, and I doubt manipulating AI will make that any faster or easier. Dubs tend to be less finicky about those details, but I can see a few directors insisting on having formal dubs over AI.
Note that if we're talking about dubbing, we don't even necessarily have "replicate" as our goal! Intonation and emotion are different between different languages and replicating the intonation of...
Agreed, emotion and intonation is the tricky part that I'm not sure AI can replicate as it can get really subtle.
Note that if we're talking about dubbing, we don't even necessarily have "replicate" as our goal! Intonation and emotion are different between different languages and replicating the intonation of the voice actor in the original language won't necessarily convey the same emotion in the target language. To approach human voice actors in this domain, even without being perfectionistic about it, the AI will also need to be able to "translate" these things into the target language, and I don't think that's even something they're aiming for atm.
I try to keep in mind that the AI we see right now is primitive compared to what we aren't seeing. I can imagine that within a couple of years, AI voice models will become indistinguishable from...
I try to keep in mind that the AI we see right now is primitive compared to what we aren't seeing. I can imagine that within a couple of years, AI voice models will become indistinguishable from humans.
Even more so, I can easily imagine a near future where a studio only needs to hire one "voice actor" to provide all of the inflections and intonations for all of the characters while a computer just replaces their voice with the originals. I'd be surprised if some studios don't already have that technology on standby.
There IS a company working in a similar vein right now called Respeecher. I linked an article a few months back about them working on the Polish dub of the Cyberpunk 2077 DLC because one of the...
There IS a company working in a similar vein right now called Respeecher. I linked an article a few months back about them working on the Polish dub of the Cyberpunk 2077 DLC because one of the original voice actors had died. They got permission from his family and then hired someone to do the lines and get the right intonation, and used AI to make the voice sound like him.
It's so far the most ethical use case of AI I've seen, and I'd support more cases that use AI to supplement voice actors rather than outright replace them. Some voices can really strain an actor's voice over time, so it would make it easier on them in the long run. I feel like combining AI and voice acting has some interesting potential that neither could fully achieve on their own.
I'm not an AI hater and even on the ethics side I'm probably more lenient than most. But they got human imitator to do Cleveland on Family Guy and I don't think most people even noticed it. Seems...
I'm not an AI hater and even on the ethics side I'm probably more lenient than most.
But they got human imitator to do Cleveland on Family Guy and I don't think most people even noticed it. Seems like human replacements can do just fine in those cases.
Ha, as if the official ones don't have dubious translations. Also, I love those notes! They'd explain things that make no sense to me, but make total sense to someone from where the show was made....
They could also be of questionable quality, and often contained copious translation notes that necessitated pausing to read.
Ha, as if the official ones don't have dubious translations. Also, I love those notes! They'd explain things that make no sense to me, but make total sense to someone from where the show was made. I've found myself googling such things on "official" subs and that takes a lot longer than reading some notes. Often I find myself wondering why the official subs are so much worse than fan subs, as if the translator did so without actually watching the show - which they probably didn't and translated from a script. They should just pay fans to translate it. Official subs/dubs often don't translate written words in the video too. Even in shows as popular as One Piece, there's text not translated on the screen which annoys me to no end. Yet the fan dubs usually translated those.
Subs are only as good as the translators. Worse, is when they're just subs of the dub. It's a pain to read and watch the show, I find myself pausing to read sometimes and it can take away from the show because you're attention is split and you interrupt immersion to read.
Dubs are only as good as the actors AND translators. There are lots of fantastic dubs, but I do often watch with subs on if it's an option. On a few shows the subs were AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SHOW. On one show, it was so bad I nearly stopped watching until I paid attention to the subs and realized whoever directed the dubs screwed the pooch and made the show terrible. I was sitting there reading a show that was different that the one I was hearing. That said, I've seen dubs that were far better than subs too.
Subs have issues, dubs have issues. Both have plus sides. Mostly it just depends on the person in charge of them and how bad a job they do.
The two points I hold for my preference, with some notes, are: Subs preserve the original character The show was cast wirh specific actors in mind. Dubs can often rewrite characters for...
The two points I hold for my preference, with some notes, are:
Subs preserve the original character
The show was cast wirh specific actors in mind. Dubs can often rewrite characters for "internationalization" or simply because the foreign qctor jas a dofferemt read on the character.
Acting quality.
I don't know how things are for most dubs today but I grew up watching quite a few Hong Kong action movies and the acting was atrocious. It's generally better now, but still not as good as, say, and American show (only because it's my native country) because of the nature of production. My recent, limited experiences have also shown that anime, especially, still sorta suffers from bad VA dubs.
There is room for a lot of nuance here that I have omitted because I don't want to write something as long as this article.
My personal preference is subtitles because I can red fast enough to go back and sync the words to the voice and read the character but I also get that not everybody can, or people simply want that experience like watching a local show. Both are valid. I was frankly surprised at how far people go to justify a position, even, as depicted in the article.
I prefer subtitles for the same reason. Also, if I can experience the original content as it was meant to be experienced, I'd prefer that. Even if I don't get all the ethno-linguistic nuances or...
I prefer subtitles for the same reason. Also, if I can experience the original content as it was meant to be experienced, I'd prefer that. Even if I don't get all the ethno-linguistic nuances or turns of phrase that exist, I can at least make an attempt to learn something about it and it feels good to be immersed in that other culture a bit, even if the show or film is fictitious.
That's a large part of what I do to further my goal of learning Japanese. I don't have a lot of time to sink into it, but I do Duolingo daily and pick things up words and phrases through osmosis...
That's a large part of what I do to further my goal of learning Japanese. I don't have a lot of time to sink into it, but I do Duolingo daily and pick things up words and phrases through osmosis from watching anime. Once you have a handle on basic grammar, and know a few words, it highlights the parts you don't know and you can figure it out from the subtitles.
I'm generally against dubs for the same reason as this subthread: a large part of the appeal of anime is that it's an engrossing, very literary medium from another cultural context. The point is to experience it that way, with the original mannerisms from the acting, social cues like name suffixes and other things that get trashed during localizations. Translations (quality subtitling) help you understand, and sometimes even add notes to preserve the original intent, while localizations (dubs and poor quality subtitling) butcher the original material.
While I generally prefer subs to dubs myself, I think the idea that localizations necessarily butcher the original material and prevent you from experiencing the work as originally intended is...
While I generally prefer subs to dubs myself, I think the idea that localizations necessarily butcher the original material and prevent you from experiencing the work as originally intended is reductive. For one, most dubs and subs these days are just translations, with only marginal differences in localization choices (as an example, in anime these days neither explicitly includes the Japanese honorifics most of the time). There are differences between them, but these are rarely large differences in the degree of localization anymore even in anime, to say nothing of other contexts.
For another, it is impossible to translate a text without making any localization choices, and less localized is not necessarily always better. There are arguments for localizing some texts more than others depending on who your target audience is and what exactly you're trying to accomplish with the resulting work, and I think it's foolish to maintain that one way is always superior.
My principle objection to dubs is actually a practical one -- I don't hear the TV as well as I used to, and it's frustrating when the subtitles and audio don't match if both are in my native language unless I'm deliberately trying to compare them for fun. But it's kinda silly to act like they're wholy inferior as a rule -- sometimes dubs are more suitable for me in particular for reasons as simple as "I want to crochet while watching and I need to occasionally look away from the TV to do that and would miss some of the subtitles as a result". Or, more generally, people will sometimes be unable to read subtitles for any number of reasons --poor vision, not being proficient enough a reader, etc. Even if dubs were inherently inferior, an inferior experience is certainly preferable to not being able to experience the work at all.
So this is the time where I come out of the woodwork with my weird opinions on this topic. This isn't meant as a way to convert you or start a heated debate, I'm just looking to get these thoughts...
So this is the time where I come out of the woodwork with my weird opinions on this topic. This isn't meant as a way to convert you or start a heated debate, I'm just looking to get these thoughts out and written down so I can move on.
Originally, I would come out and say something like: Quality dubs > subs > shit dubs. But that's way to simplified. I had to really think about what, to me, indicates that a dub is "quality"
Well, I've concluded that it's based on a few factors:
The performance of the voice actors.
The quality of the translations into their new language
The setting and theme of the anime.
If any of these three things is wrong, then the dub will have a high chance of falling flat.
Item number 1 has become the most consistently good item in this day in age. These VAs in general have become students of their art. In video games, I actually generally prefer English VAs because of this. However, this is the topic on anime, so I'm going to focus more on that for this.
Item number 2 is hit or miss, but generally better than not these days. Back in the early days of anime and dubbing, so much would be lost on the cutting room floor, or even transformed because of "expectations" of the audience. The most infamous one is in Sailor Moon where Uranus and Neptune were turned from a lesbian couple to cousins which managed to successfully make it legitimately weird when they would flirt with one another in the segments where they couldn't cut content without making it an overtly bad edit.
Subs aren't immune to item number 2 either, so it's really up to the team involved to get it right. My most aggrivating scenario of poor subtitle translations are from A Certain Scientific Railgun. Kuroko is infatuated with Misaka (and this is a severe understatement) and consistently refers to Misaka, who is a year older, as "Onee-sama" in speech as a way of showing her immense... affection. In the age of fan subs, when I originally watched this show, the translators then just left the "onee-sama" part out. If you knew enough about Japanese honorifics, you could easily pick up what was going on. I mean, if you've ever watched the show you know it's not subtle at all. Anyways, I decided to try and watch the third season on Crunchyroll one time and got immediately turned off because they decided to more literally translate her speech. The word they chose to use for her lines? "Sissy". Yes, it is accurate and really pushes how weird Kuroko is, but it doesn't flow well with the intended speech when the character is putting on a forced delicate accent. Regardless, I've never actually watched beyond the second season because of that one translation bug alone. (And, of course, it transfers to the dub and it makes it land flat for me purely on that point alone)
Which brings me to item 3. Honestly, this is the most important item in the list for me. It's the setting and theme of the show. There's one hard and fast rule for me: If the show is primarily set in Japan itself, or the setting is heavily pulling from traditional Japanese culture, then that show does not need to be dubbed. It just needs to be expertly subtitled. Now, this obviously takes away more than half of the anime out there, but it makes sense. I can't imagine shows like Haruhi, Demon Slayer or Haikyu!! in anything but their japanese dubbings because of their inherent settings.
In fact, I like to take it a step further. I adore the rare moment when a show takes acknowledgement of that different languages exist. Golden Kamuy is my feature point of this, as when the story transfers around, characters don't just all speak Japanese to one another even though they would naturally speak different languages. When they visit Ainu villages or venture towards Russia, they need a translator. There's a Russian character that, at one point, follows the main party around but cannot really communicate because of the language barrier. It's wonderful. In contrast, while I adored the show "Great Pretenders", in the first episode they break the 4th wall and say "Hey, they're just gonna all speak Japanese now instead of English" and run with it for the most of the rest of the show. I get it, it would be a harder sell for the primary market. I really would love a dubbed version of that show where the characters speak the intended language, and not just a common one. but maybe I'm weird like that.
Returning the the original point of this: If the setting/style of the show isn't inherently Japanese, then I feel the show is a good candidate for dubbing. Doubly for the language in which the setting takes place. Cowboy Bebop is the prime example of this. It's a space western. Nothing is ridiculously Japanese about it in the setting at all, and it's heavily western influenced in design. The dubs? Out of this world good. IMO, by far the best way to watch the show. Everything was so perfectly translated, cast and performed that it vastly outperforms the original Japanese dubs. Another one I think actually added to the show's quality was the Code Geass dubs. It also fits with the setting, as of course English would be a primary language, given that Japan is currently under occupation by Britannia. (again, would love a dual language version where the resistance communicates in Japanese, but that's just me being weird again)
Ultimately, I don't watch dubs much anymore. Some are amazing, some not so much. Some are so bad they're awesome (looking at you, Ghost Stories) but my wife and our friends are of the ridiculously strict "Subs over dubs" club and it's not worth it for me to take the time to watch the dubs myself. Besides, any way you watch it is fine because there is no wrong way to do it, just so long as you're enjoying yourself that's all that matters to me.
In the case of Cowboy Bebop it probably helped that the English dub received a good deal more love (especially for that point in time) than most dubs do. As I recall, the sound engineers...
In the case of Cowboy Bebop it probably helped that the English dub received a good deal more love (especially for that point in time) than most dubs do. As I recall, the sound engineers responsible actually added a great deal of environmental sound effects that weren’t present in the Japanese audio (think things like the noise of an air conditioner running when there’s an air conditioner in the scene somewhere in the background), which no doubt has a big impact on the show’s legendary atmosphere and mood. It’s also why the English audio on the Blu-rays is available in 5.1 surround whereas the Japanese audio tops out at stereo.
Full Metal Alchemist is another one of those shows where western language dubs might be better fitting, given how the main setting is very obviously inspired by Western Europe.
I do have a handful of shows where I've only seen the dubs, or actually prefer them, though they are rare...and Cowboy Bebop is one of them. The other notable one is Fullmetal Alchemist (both...
I do have a handful of shows where I've only seen the dubs, or actually prefer them, though they are rare...and Cowboy Bebop is one of them. The other notable one is Fullmetal Alchemist (both Brotherhood and '03). The English voice acting is excellent and I've never thought to go back and watch in the original Japanese. (Honorable mention: Spice and Wolf.)
Regarding the translation of honorifics, this drives me crazy. A lot of shows now will translate honorifics in an awkward fashion ("big bro insert-name-here!") when they would be best kept verbatim. I want them kept, and not translated at all. I've also noticed (on CrunchyRoll) some subtitled shows inserting more English colloquialisms as well, taking more liberties with dialogue in the same manner dubs do.
Subtitles fundamentally distract me from the rest of the screen, I can only focus on reading them instead of actually watching the anime/movie. I lose far more from that than I would from not...
Subtitles fundamentally distract me from the rest of the screen, I can only focus on reading them instead of actually watching the anime/movie. I lose far more from that than I would from not hearing people speak in a language I can't even understand.
I use subtitles even for media where I can understand the language. I hate missing bits of dialogue due to bad mixing or just because I'm munching on something while watching.
I use subtitles even for media where I can understand the language. I hate missing bits of dialogue due to bad mixing or just because I'm munching on something while watching.
I oreffer dubbed over subtitles with exceptions: in cinema I prefer original with subtitles in some movies the dubbed sound gets muted or distorted or replaced and it isn't worth watching dubbed...
I oreffer dubbed over subtitles with exceptions:
in cinema I prefer original with subtitles
in some movies the dubbed sound gets muted or distorted or replaced and it isn't worth watching dubbed (ie. Scarface in Czech language - if there is interest, I will cut and upload a sample in about 10 hours from now)
I recall some movies from my childhoods with specific dubbing and I can't accept newer one (due to specific quotes)
some movies simply can't be dubbed successfully, ie. Ali G Indahouse (where you have to watch it in original language with no subtitles at all), or they can but need very very good person to make translation and very good voice actors to dub the characters
The last point is especially true for Czech version of The Simpsons where the translator does exceptional job in getting all the nuances there and the same goes for voice actors.
some excerpts
I thought this part was interesting:
Something else that complicates things with subs vs. dubs with anime in the west is that for many years it was common for the studios performing English localization to play extremely fast and loose, editing out segments, cutting episodes, rewriting characters, making changes to animation, and in some cases throwing almost everything out and recutting a show into an entirely different series with a new story.
This left a bad taste not only in the mouths of fans (who were keenly aware of the changes thanks to fansubs), but also in those of creators in Japan. The first English dub of Nausicaa Valley of the Wind was one such dub, which was so bad (20m of runtime removed, recut into a generic action-adventure with no message) that Studio Ghibli refused to license English dubs for a decade.
This history influences a lot of the polarization on the subject in the anime fandom even today, a good 15-20 years after aggressively bad localizations went extinct.
There are a lot of anime sub>dub purists that I think have lost the plot a bit. If you like the voice actors better or whatever sure, but the primary reason for the preference has all but disappeared. They don't really do re-edits of shows anymore like happened with Sailor Moon or Nausicaa, or crazy extensive ones like Robotech, unless it's intentional like Ghost Story.
The original voice acting is better in most cases. Besides, for a lot of people, Japanese is the language that makes sense for anime. That is much in the same way that one might prefer their opera in Italian, or their metal music in English. I wouldn't call that being a "purist", it is just an aesthetic preference built over time. Japanese just "sounds right" to some people.
There is a lot of fairly well regarded opera in german, same for metal and sweedish and other languages. I can only speak for older spanish dubs, but for me the bigger issues with anime dubs in particular are:
Another thing that I see a lot is people complaining that some nuance of japanese is lost in translation. Things like (some) honorifics and set phrases. People want to hear "senpai", "oniichan", et al in their anime. I'm kind of torn on this because while I think the honor dynamics are indeed lost in translation unless you clumsily add them to the english version (via adding the words or reworking the dialog), hearing someone say "oniichan wouldn't do that!" is firgernails-on-chalkboard horrible.
As you eloquently put, there are many nuances to this discussion for sure.
I didn't mean to say that opera is only good in Italian, or that metal music is only good in English. I was just trying to express that some people do expect certain content to be in a specific language and that is a valid preference that I don't consider merely a purism.
My personal opinion on the issue of honorifics reflects my overall attitude towards anime and manga translation.
Maybe similarly to you, I generally dislike how fan translations of anime tend to be overly reverent to the source material. The purpose of translation is to transport meaning, but if you're too bound to transport everything at all times you end up with huge subs that are hard to read and footnotes that no one will pause for. I don't believe it is possible to translate honorifics well, but adding footnotes or simply keeping the Japanese words is even worse in my view. Ultimately, I prefer having fun, even if that means not transmitting every detail of Japanese culture.
I see. To be fair, when I first watched the original Avatar TLA I had an issue similar to what you describe. It was my first english speaking animated show in a while and at first my brain was very unhappy with how it looked anime-ish but sounded english, even if that was the original dub.
I had a similar experience when I was first watching Castlevania. I switched to the Japanese dub for a moment and found it quite good. However, the English dub is just marvelous. Which makes sense given that it is the original one -- it's the one overseen by the creators, with way more time and resources than localizations usually have. From a production perspective, it makes sense for the original dub to have have a superior quality in many cases.
I don't think this is a fair comparison, and I say this as someone who generally does prefer subs. Opera has a number of poetic factors at play that would be lost in translation, so translating an opera from the language it's originally written in would have much graver effects on the final product than any modern anime translations (dubs or otherwise). I'm with you that it's an aesthetic choice that some people (myself included) prefer, I just think comparing watching a dub to listening an Italian opera in English is an overreach.
This is not what I said, and I think it's quite silly to pretend as if it is. Opera (whether in Italian or any other language) both is set to music and is often poetry. This means things like "the words have to line up with the music" and other poetic concerns like meter and rhyme are often considerations. These things are not issues when translating something that is neither music nor poetry, which is the vast majority of anime. Translating music and poetry is more difficult generally than normal dialogue -- the same is true for translating Japanese songs into English for anime, for instance, which is more difficult and is done less often.
I already said I watch most of my anime subbed so I don't really need the lecture on "the richness, sophistication, and uniqueness of voice acting in Japanese". I'm just saying that translating normal dialogue in an anime is very different from translating music or poetry, and thus the comparison to opera falls flat.
There is definitive rhythm and other concerns with just dialogue. Like a sentence that might take 5 seconds to say in Japanese, could in some cases need 6 seconds to get the same meaning in another language. Making the translator forced to make the sentence shorter or have the dubber speak faster. Both of which can alter the perception of the dialogue and subtle nuances. And whether one sees those changes as have a great effect or not is pretty much subjective, and could apply to opera just as well as anime dubs depending on what one finds important with either of these.
Oh yeah I'm not trying to downplay that issues like this exist in dubbing! They definitely do, as you describe. But all these issues that are present in dubbing dialogue are dialed up to 11 when it comes to music -- there are definitely people who watch mostly dubbed anime but dislike when yhe Japanese music in an OP is translated, for instance, because it exacerbates problems that are easier for them to overlook (and for translators to compensate for). And poetry, written or spoken, adds a HUGE number of components that almost always either hugely complicate the translation process or must be ignored (and thus lost). Think of how difficult translating something like The Cat and the Hat into another language would be -- unless you got quite lucky with the rhymes in the target language, you inevitably have a lot of very hard choices to make in translating it because of its poetic nature. And that's a deliberately simple poem at that! I can't imagine how difficult those choices are for someone translating something like The Iliad, with much more historical and cultural baggage resting on it.
I don't intend to say these are completely unrelated problems to those encountered in normal translation of dialogue and such! I just want to emphasize the degree to which music and poetry increase the difficulty for a translator in actually capturing as much of the original as possible in a translation. I think it does a disservice to the hard work of translating works with these particular elements. Translation is difficult more generally as well, but going for poetry or music really is "hard mode" in many respects, and that can naturally influence one's experience and preference for the final result. This can even vary within anime based on the subject-matter -- I don't think the dub of Death Note takes much away from a viewer's experience (despite preferring the Japanese voice acting myself), but I'm not even sure it would be possible to dub something like Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju.
Of course, but it’s easy to see how someone who had an experience (or multiple) with bad dubs/localizations years ago and hasn’t watched any dubs since then might still carry a distaste.
For me it comes down to the quality of casting and direction (a lot of dubs still phone these in) and the context of the show/movie — English dubs can feel a bit weird in a show set in Japan compared to one that takes place in a setting that’s e.g. western inspired or without strong cultural associations like space.
In regards to Robotech, what do you mean by extensive? I haven't watched the show in years and I never touched the subs.
Robotech isn't an anime series. Or rather it's three anime with similar styles that were smooshed together to make Robotech. It's both impressive and insane that they actually managed to make a more or less cohesive story by editing the different shows and making it take place over 'generations'.
To be fair to the people who put Robotech together, the other shows they stitched together were not entirely unrelated. They were spin-offs of the original series. It’s still full of egregious changes but it could have been worse.
Well, there was this show
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotech
that was made by smashing together three giant robot anime, watching them with the sound off, then writing a script. (At least they trashed Macross but left Gundam alone) Then there was Cardcaptors which edited away almost half of the brilliant Cardcaptor Sakura because they didn't think an American audience could handle a female protagonist. (I think they did leave the episode where she wears a rubber dress though!)
Something funny though is that many of the American voice actors that we bitterly complained about early on stuck with it and "got good". Japanese video games frequently have English voices as good as the Japanese. I can't make up my mind if Melissa Fahn plays Neptune as well as the Japanese actress and that's saying something because her Japanese actress is Tanaka Rie.
I'm not in the field, but I think there has to be something cultural among American translators that causes this.
I recently saw a discussion of a few really good local (non-english speaking country) book translators who are apparently all aware that Americans tend to take too many liberties with translating foreign books to a degree that would likely cause a scandal where I live. Being from a small non-english speaking country, a portion of foreign non-english books sold here is done as foreign language -> English -> local language re-translations because it's cheaper, and most book enthusiasts know it's good to avoid those not because two translation steps are necessarily a problem in general, but because specifically the English translation in the middle means you may be reading a slightly different book.
This also happens with videogames, so it seems to be a different approach to translation in general and I wonder where it came from.
Commonly seen in subtitles of "Netflix Original" anime over 2023:
Character: "Hai"
Subtitle text: "Why, yes, I'm doing well, and how are you on this beautiful sunny day?"
Sometimes the subs are not super accurate to put it mildly.
Usually when I’ve seen this happen it’s because the english subs are actually “dubtitles”, where in place of subtitles they’ve used closed captioning from the dub.
It’s frustrating because though dubtitles are technically functional, they’re lazy/cheap. Subtitles aren’t subject to the same problems/limitations as dubs (e.g. they don’t need to match lip flapping) and have the opportunity to be more direct and less localized, and so should be separate from closed captioning.
It makes it sound less of a "debate" and more of a "the powerful like to use dubbing for sneaky propaganda and censorship" which I feel is comparable to "debating" the shape of the Earth. Technically you can put 2 people in a room and make them argue, sure, but one of them is rare, and either not sincere or not sane, and in the end, reality doesn't care about their opinions. Inclusion of subtitles you can turn on or off should be legally mandated specifically to undermine such abuses, and of course help HOH and other people with auditory processing issues.
Inclusion of dubbing or not could then be a debate.
Does it really? I don't think it's controversial to say that the use of dubbing is often political because a lot of non-English countries use dubbing to try to "preserve" their native language and a lot of debate ensues around this.
Also this is only a small part of the article, if you read it the article goes into a lot of detail on the history of dubbing.
I hate to repeat myself, but "Inclusion of subtitles you can turn on or off", "undermine (...) abuses". You do not refer to it at all.
You are talking about "Inclusion of dubbing or not could then be a debate." And I didn't really made any comments on that.
When you say "undermine (...) abuses" I don't think the article is arguing (and I am certainly not arguing) that dubbing is somehow being used to nefariously indoctrinate people with propaganda; the argument is that dubbing is popular among nativist politicians who see it as a way to further their own language above others.
Subtitles are a legal requirement for broadcast media in many countries, including the UK and US.
It's interesting that culture and history play such a big part in dubbing. As a Chinese language learner, I'm often extremely frustrated by the lack of mandarin dubs available in streaming services, such and Netflix and Amazon. It seems there's a Spanish or German dub on absolutely everything, but rarely a mandarin dub. When there is, it's almost exclusively reserved for cartoons and family films.
This has always surprised me because Chinese is the second most spoken language on Earth. I always put it down to the fact that most Chinese speakers live behind the great firewall and it probably isn't worth it for streaming services to create dubs in Chinese. However, what does baffle me is that there are plenty of films that I know for a fact have official/good dubs in Chinese because I've watched them before in that dub, but can't find them anywhere on streaming services. Plenty of Disney films have official Chinese dubs but aren't listed on Disney+, which I just can't understand. Perhaps it's because there just isn't a culture for it in Chinese speaking people.
When I lived in Taiwan, Taiwanese Netflix had plenty of media dubbed in Chinese. Moving back to the UK, most of this had been removed. I can't understand this. If Netflix already owns the dubbing, it can't cost that much more to run that dubbing in multiple regions, can it?
What language is your Netflix? It may have changed but at one point it wouldn’t list all the subs and dubs available, it would just give a generic list of them. Changing the language setting in Netflix to the language I needed dubs and subs for would make that language show up. It also seems to bump Netflix-made content from countries with that language up in the recommendations.
And the website and apps have gotten so much worse for browsing over the decades but it might still be possible to search by audio.
This is absolutely true -- my wife is constantly frustrated because she wants to show me Norwegian dubs of kid's movies, but they're not available for us to select here in Germany for all films (it's inconsistent yay).
That said, some languages do just get dubs more often than others more generally. Germans LOVE their dubs, so more movies get dubbed in the first place. I don't think dubs into Chinese are nearly as common (especially since Chinese TV often has baked-in subs anyway, so I wager they're culturally more used to subs in general), especially for non-children's films.
This is probably a licensing issue. Probably also to keep people from buying international accounts.
... Also different regions might have different laws and some sections might need to be deleted or rephrased to avoid censorship / different age ratings.
It may be a licensing issue sometimes, but I don't think it is universally. Netflix originals are a good test case here -- they usually do have more language options for a given region than non-Netflix originals, but they definitely don't display all of their options for audio or subtitles last I checked. They tend to limit it to a set of languages common in your region regardless I think. For instance, I live in Germany, and neither my sub or dub options for Glass Onion include Spanish, but I'm certain one or both exist and would be accessible if I were in a different country.
In the US, I have options for both Spanish (Latin America) and Spanish (Spain).
Suspicions confirmed then! Thanks
... turning it around the other way I have been amazed at how stupendously bad English subtitles are for Chinese titles such as the (fantastic!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Kingdoms_(TV_series) I was pretty mad that I got a copy of Investiture of the Gods that was advertised to have English subtitles but it didn't... And it looks really good.
I’ve definitely seen horrible subtitles for Chinese media before. But it’s not only Chinese media, it’s anything where there isn’t much interest in English speaking countries for whatever reason (and it rarely matters how good the show is). I even saw it when some of the less famous Steven Chow comedies started coming to Netflix. But in those cases there almost certainly is no English dub, so it really comes down to there simply not being a good translation for the material because the people releasing that version were not willing to invest in it. Which is something of a shame because it seems like such a small investment for something that will presumably make it back many times over.
As a side note many Chinese movies have post-dubbed dialogue, so it seems like something of a missed opportunity to not have localized dubbing for them. The lips never quite matched in the first place.
Let me point out that neither subtitles nor dubs have an intrinsic advantage in fidelity to the source material.
I've been a long-time viewer of films in languages other than English. [Overall, the foreign movies and TV productions that make it to the States have already been filtered against Sturgeon's Law, and I'm more likely to enjoy them than any random example of Hollywood product.] I have just enough fluency in German that I know when subtitles or dubbing have omitted part of the dialogue, lost nuance, or been inaccurate. For example, I've watched both subtitled and dubbed versions of Das Boot. This is an unusual case, because the same actors gave the English-language voiceover performance, and it's not nearly as bad as typical dub quality. However, the same omissions were present, as if only one English script translation was used for both. Of note is that much of the more colorful language and salacious discussion was altered or censored for BBC and US broadcast requirements.
Spouse is partially deaf, so it's usual for us to watch subtitled English content as well, especially with the depreciation of sound recording quality in current productions. All the complaints about poor subtitling apply here - it's jarring to hear words and phrases that absolutely aren't in the subtitle text or are rendered incorrectly. I'd like the swearing to be undiluted by dumb euphemisms, please.
We all recognize the terrible quality of voiceover acting in most dubs (see Shaolin Fox Conspiracy for one of the funniest examples of over-the-top melodramatic reading). The sync problems between the actors' facial movements and the audio are very disruptive to immersion in the production, for me at least. I don't have examples, but I know that professional-quality AI is now being used to bridge this gap, and I'm curious to see the results. There are deepfake dangers when audiences have no means to tell if the content might have been modified.
If I was going to pay for a service or apply legal requirements, I'd like a link to a well-translated version of the original script for reference on every production.
I can't say I am good at Japanese at all but when I watch dubbed anime I find myself translating back common phrases back to Japanese (e.g. there's a reason why people in a translated anime always say "Leave it to me!")
The first few chapters of an introductory Japanese book are covered pretty well in anime: they really do say "Daijobu Desu Ka?" as often as they do in Ranma 1/2 so it's not just that people in anime are getting injured all the time. When I lived in Germany I sometimes had the experience of being able to do a transaction at the bank or something that seemed to be ahead of my "book" knowledge but I've got the fear that if I went to Japan I might say something like "Let's transform and beat up the enemy"
I find myself doing this with some non-audio translations too, though less with specific phrases and more with certain styles of speech -- particularly in scenes that rely on characters not having information that was omitted in the Japanese text, but which would be much less natural to omit in the English text. I'm playing the 2nd Professor Layton game with my wife now and we recently came across just such a scene, where the translators clearly had to massage the sentences to avoid giving away something with the default English grammar that would not be given away in the default Japanese grammar. But then I didn't notice it (or at least didn't attribute it to translation) when I played the game as a kid, so I suppose it works!
Another fun one -- my wife and I love comparing the different subtitling choices made for that one scene in Your Name that's literally impossible to translate out of Japanese. We have a copy with subs in a bunch of different languages and it's always fun to see how translators chose to tackle that scene.
I wonder how much of the passion in this debate comes from people who are afraid of the industry taking away the mode they're arguing for. In my mind, accessibility is the most important reason that both should exist.
An accessibility talk I attended years ago pointed out that while we tend to think of permanent disability when we discuss accessibility, most of us will have some disability at some point in our lives. We might break a bone, get an ear infection, or get our eyes dilated. Even more short term and applicable to this, we might want to watch a movie without disturbing someone in the next room, or maybe to watch a movie on the bus, but the subtitles are too small to read.
There isn't a "better" between these two sides. There is what I need right now and what I might need tomorrow.
People declaring that others are lazy or dumb over this is just awful. That kind of self centered snobbery is far too common.
Watching English speaking movies dubbed in my language as a kid, I had no idea Americans could curse. When I started learning English, I realized subtitles did the same. The movies where "morality washed". The phrase "I'm gonna fuck you in the ass you dirty whore" became "I'm gonna kiss you gently, marry you and make a decent woman out of you ". Just a little exaggeration but you get the point. The Sopranos subs in my language on HBO make it suitable for 12-year-olds. It's a disgrace. This is certainly not a new issue and subtitles should (shocking!) reflect the original material even when they contain words we find offensive.
A lot of translators are like a dude desperately trying to make Lovecraft sound sunny and cheery.
In any case, at least with subtitles they keep the original
contentaudio available for those who know the language.Edit: in an interesting note, Schwarzenegger's voice acting in my language is actually a much better actor than Schwarzenegger, so in that case I much prefer the dub lol. But that's an extreme case!
Not always! For instance, Youtube's auto-captions black out any curse words. We have to actively fight to avoid censorship even in same-language subs.
Yes, subtitles are by no means either faithful or reliable in conveying the original meanings and intent. I only meant to say that in that case the original audio remains present for those who can understand it.
Very intersting! We used to have the same thing with Louis De Funès, where the voice actor made him into someone even funnier, and iirc even Funès himself gave him praise.
How to say you are from Czechia without saying you are from Czechia. :-)
This whole debate is about to become irrelevant; we have AI technology today that can dub video in the original speaker’s own voice, and sync up the character’s lips to match. The result is so seamless you wouldn’t even know it was originally produced in a different language.
The tech is controversial, but it’s here and we’re only likely to see more of it in the coming years. Maybe people will still argue about dubbing vs. subtitles, but in my estimation both are going to be considered antiquated in short order.
While the relevant AI technology is impressive, I don't think it is yet to a point where it can entirely replace hiring voice actors to dub a work. And even if it were perfect, subtitles would still need to exist and I'm sure some fraction of people would prefer them regardless.
Agreed, emotion and intonation is the tricky part that I'm not sure AI can replicate as it can get really subtle. It really struck me when I saw Animaniacs! In Concert last fall, with Rob Paulsen (Yakko) singing some of the songs. There was one about Dot that's super upbeat in tone and melody, but Yakko and Wakko have this edge of exasperation and despair when they sing their parts. It's almost contradictory, and I can't see AI being able to get that "upbeat but comedically upset" intonation without a lot of work and tweaking. Seems like it would be much easier and faster to direct a skilled voice actor and singer to get that sort of tone.
Obviously that's a very specific example, but I know some people who work in these industries are perfectionists. They can get VERY picky about line delivery, especially when musical numbers are involved. There are tales of lines being recorded multiple times until the director or actor is satisfied with the result, and I doubt manipulating AI will make that any faster or easier. Dubs tend to be less finicky about those details, but I can see a few directors insisting on having formal dubs over AI.
Note that if we're talking about dubbing, we don't even necessarily have "replicate" as our goal! Intonation and emotion are different between different languages and replicating the intonation of the voice actor in the original language won't necessarily convey the same emotion in the target language. To approach human voice actors in this domain, even without being perfectionistic about it, the AI will also need to be able to "translate" these things into the target language, and I don't think that's even something they're aiming for atm.
I try to keep in mind that the AI we see right now is primitive compared to what we aren't seeing. I can imagine that within a couple of years, AI voice models will become indistinguishable from humans.
Even more so, I can easily imagine a near future where a studio only needs to hire one "voice actor" to provide all of the inflections and intonations for all of the characters while a computer just replaces their voice with the originals. I'd be surprised if some studios don't already have that technology on standby.
There IS a company working in a similar vein right now called Respeecher. I linked an article a few months back about them working on the Polish dub of the Cyberpunk 2077 DLC because one of the original voice actors had died. They got permission from his family and then hired someone to do the lines and get the right intonation, and used AI to make the voice sound like him.
It's so far the most ethical use case of AI I've seen, and I'd support more cases that use AI to supplement voice actors rather than outright replace them. Some voices can really strain an actor's voice over time, so it would make it easier on them in the long run. I feel like combining AI and voice acting has some interesting potential that neither could fully achieve on their own.
I'm not an AI hater and even on the ethics side I'm probably more lenient than most.
But they got human imitator to do Cleveland on Family Guy and I don't think most people even noticed it. Seems like human replacements can do just fine in those cases.
Ha, as if the official ones don't have dubious translations. Also, I love those notes! They'd explain things that make no sense to me, but make total sense to someone from where the show was made. I've found myself googling such things on "official" subs and that takes a lot longer than reading some notes. Often I find myself wondering why the official subs are so much worse than fan subs, as if the translator did so without actually watching the show - which they probably didn't and translated from a script. They should just pay fans to translate it. Official subs/dubs often don't translate written words in the video too. Even in shows as popular as One Piece, there's text not translated on the screen which annoys me to no end. Yet the fan dubs usually translated those.
Subs are only as good as the translators. Worse, is when they're just subs of the dub. It's a pain to read and watch the show, I find myself pausing to read sometimes and it can take away from the show because you're attention is split and you interrupt immersion to read.
Dubs are only as good as the actors AND translators. There are lots of fantastic dubs, but I do often watch with subs on if it's an option. On a few shows the subs were AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SHOW. On one show, it was so bad I nearly stopped watching until I paid attention to the subs and realized whoever directed the dubs screwed the pooch and made the show terrible. I was sitting there reading a show that was different that the one I was hearing. That said, I've seen dubs that were far better than subs too.
Subs have issues, dubs have issues. Both have plus sides. Mostly it just depends on the person in charge of them and how bad a job they do.
The two points I hold for my preference, with some notes, are:
The show was cast wirh specific actors in mind. Dubs can often rewrite characters for "internationalization" or simply because the foreign qctor jas a dofferemt read on the character.
I don't know how things are for most dubs today but I grew up watching quite a few Hong Kong action movies and the acting was atrocious. It's generally better now, but still not as good as, say, and American show (only because it's my native country) because of the nature of production. My recent, limited experiences have also shown that anime, especially, still sorta suffers from bad VA dubs.
There is room for a lot of nuance here that I have omitted because I don't want to write something as long as this article.
My personal preference is subtitles because I can red fast enough to go back and sync the words to the voice and read the character but I also get that not everybody can, or people simply want that experience like watching a local show. Both are valid. I was frankly surprised at how far people go to justify a position, even, as depicted in the article.
TIL there's a debate on subs vs dubs.
For me it's really simple. Animation and CGI should be dubbed, live-action should be subbed.
I prefer subtitles for the same reason. Also, if I can experience the original content as it was meant to be experienced, I'd prefer that. Even if I don't get all the ethno-linguistic nuances or turns of phrase that exist, I can at least make an attempt to learn something about it and it feels good to be immersed in that other culture a bit, even if the show or film is fictitious.
That's a large part of what I do to further my goal of learning Japanese. I don't have a lot of time to sink into it, but I do Duolingo daily and pick things up words and phrases through osmosis from watching anime. Once you have a handle on basic grammar, and know a few words, it highlights the parts you don't know and you can figure it out from the subtitles.
I'm generally against dubs for the same reason as this subthread: a large part of the appeal of anime is that it's an engrossing, very literary medium from another cultural context. The point is to experience it that way, with the original mannerisms from the acting, social cues like name suffixes and other things that get trashed during localizations. Translations (quality subtitling) help you understand, and sometimes even add notes to preserve the original intent, while localizations (dubs and poor quality subtitling) butcher the original material.
While I generally prefer subs to dubs myself, I think the idea that localizations necessarily butcher the original material and prevent you from experiencing the work as originally intended is reductive. For one, most dubs and subs these days are just translations, with only marginal differences in localization choices (as an example, in anime these days neither explicitly includes the Japanese honorifics most of the time). There are differences between them, but these are rarely large differences in the degree of localization anymore even in anime, to say nothing of other contexts.
For another, it is impossible to translate a text without making any localization choices, and less localized is not necessarily always better. There are arguments for localizing some texts more than others depending on who your target audience is and what exactly you're trying to accomplish with the resulting work, and I think it's foolish to maintain that one way is always superior.
My principle objection to dubs is actually a practical one -- I don't hear the TV as well as I used to, and it's frustrating when the subtitles and audio don't match if both are in my native language unless I'm deliberately trying to compare them for fun. But it's kinda silly to act like they're wholy inferior as a rule -- sometimes dubs are more suitable for me in particular for reasons as simple as "I want to crochet while watching and I need to occasionally look away from the TV to do that and would miss some of the subtitles as a result". Or, more generally, people will sometimes be unable to read subtitles for any number of reasons --poor vision, not being proficient enough a reader, etc. Even if dubs were inherently inferior, an inferior experience is certainly preferable to not being able to experience the work at all.
If you haven't found them yet, I highly recommend the shows Midnight Diner and Giri/Haji
Midnight Diner is my jam.
So this is the time where I come out of the woodwork with my weird opinions on this topic. This isn't meant as a way to convert you or start a heated debate, I'm just looking to get these thoughts out and written down so I can move on.
Originally, I would come out and say something like: Quality dubs > subs > shit dubs. But that's way to simplified. I had to really think about what, to me, indicates that a dub is "quality"
Well, I've concluded that it's based on a few factors:
If any of these three things is wrong, then the dub will have a high chance of falling flat.
Item number 1 has become the most consistently good item in this day in age. These VAs in general have become students of their art. In video games, I actually generally prefer English VAs because of this. However, this is the topic on anime, so I'm going to focus more on that for this.
Item number 2 is hit or miss, but generally better than not these days. Back in the early days of anime and dubbing, so much would be lost on the cutting room floor, or even transformed because of "expectations" of the audience. The most infamous one is in Sailor Moon where Uranus and Neptune were turned from a lesbian couple to cousins which managed to successfully make it legitimately weird when they would flirt with one another in the segments where they couldn't cut content without making it an overtly bad edit.
Subs aren't immune to item number 2 either, so it's really up to the team involved to get it right. My most aggrivating scenario of poor subtitle translations are from A Certain Scientific Railgun. Kuroko is infatuated with Misaka (and this is a severe understatement) and consistently refers to Misaka, who is a year older, as "Onee-sama" in speech as a way of showing her immense... affection. In the age of fan subs, when I originally watched this show, the translators then just left the "onee-sama" part out. If you knew enough about Japanese honorifics, you could easily pick up what was going on. I mean, if you've ever watched the show you know it's not subtle at all. Anyways, I decided to try and watch the third season on Crunchyroll one time and got immediately turned off because they decided to more literally translate her speech. The word they chose to use for her lines? "Sissy". Yes, it is accurate and really pushes how weird Kuroko is, but it doesn't flow well with the intended speech when the character is putting on a forced delicate accent. Regardless, I've never actually watched beyond the second season because of that one translation bug alone. (And, of course, it transfers to the dub and it makes it land flat for me purely on that point alone)
Which brings me to item 3. Honestly, this is the most important item in the list for me. It's the setting and theme of the show. There's one hard and fast rule for me: If the show is primarily set in Japan itself, or the setting is heavily pulling from traditional Japanese culture, then that show does not need to be dubbed. It just needs to be expertly subtitled. Now, this obviously takes away more than half of the anime out there, but it makes sense. I can't imagine shows like Haruhi, Demon Slayer or Haikyu!! in anything but their japanese dubbings because of their inherent settings.
In fact, I like to take it a step further. I adore the rare moment when a show takes acknowledgement of that different languages exist. Golden Kamuy is my feature point of this, as when the story transfers around, characters don't just all speak Japanese to one another even though they would naturally speak different languages. When they visit Ainu villages or venture towards Russia, they need a translator. There's a Russian character that, at one point, follows the main party around but cannot really communicate because of the language barrier. It's wonderful. In contrast, while I adored the show "Great Pretenders", in the first episode they break the 4th wall and say "Hey, they're just gonna all speak Japanese now instead of English" and run with it for the most of the rest of the show. I get it, it would be a harder sell for the primary market. I really would love a dubbed version of that show where the characters speak the intended language, and not just a common one. but maybe I'm weird like that.
Returning the the original point of this: If the setting/style of the show isn't inherently Japanese, then I feel the show is a good candidate for dubbing. Doubly for the language in which the setting takes place. Cowboy Bebop is the prime example of this. It's a space western. Nothing is ridiculously Japanese about it in the setting at all, and it's heavily western influenced in design. The dubs? Out of this world good. IMO, by far the best way to watch the show. Everything was so perfectly translated, cast and performed that it vastly outperforms the original Japanese dubs. Another one I think actually added to the show's quality was the Code Geass dubs. It also fits with the setting, as of course English would be a primary language, given that Japan is currently under occupation by Britannia. (again, would love a dual language version where the resistance communicates in Japanese, but that's just me being weird again)
Ultimately, I don't watch dubs much anymore. Some are amazing, some not so much. Some are so bad they're awesome (looking at you, Ghost Stories) but my wife and our friends are of the ridiculously strict "Subs over dubs" club and it's not worth it for me to take the time to watch the dubs myself. Besides, any way you watch it is fine because there is no wrong way to do it, just so long as you're enjoying yourself that's all that matters to me.
In the case of Cowboy Bebop it probably helped that the English dub received a good deal more love (especially for that point in time) than most dubs do. As I recall, the sound engineers responsible actually added a great deal of environmental sound effects that weren’t present in the Japanese audio (think things like the noise of an air conditioner running when there’s an air conditioner in the scene somewhere in the background), which no doubt has a big impact on the show’s legendary atmosphere and mood. It’s also why the English audio on the Blu-rays is available in 5.1 surround whereas the Japanese audio tops out at stereo.
Full Metal Alchemist is another one of those shows where western language dubs might be better fitting, given how the main setting is very obviously inspired by Western Europe.
I do have a handful of shows where I've only seen the dubs, or actually prefer them, though they are rare...and Cowboy Bebop is one of them. The other notable one is Fullmetal Alchemist (both Brotherhood and '03). The English voice acting is excellent and I've never thought to go back and watch in the original Japanese. (Honorable mention: Spice and Wolf.)
Regarding the translation of honorifics, this drives me crazy. A lot of shows now will translate honorifics in an awkward fashion ("big bro insert-name-here!") when they would be best kept verbatim. I want them kept, and not translated at all. I've also noticed (on CrunchyRoll) some subtitled shows inserting more English colloquialisms as well, taking more liberties with dialogue in the same manner dubs do.
Subtitles fundamentally distract me from the rest of the screen, I can only focus on reading them instead of actually watching the anime/movie. I lose far more from that than I would from not hearing people speak in a language I can't even understand.
I use subtitles even for media where I can understand the language. I hate missing bits of dialogue due to bad mixing or just because I'm munching on something while watching.
I oreffer dubbed over subtitles with exceptions:
The last point is especially true for Czech version of The Simpsons where the translator does exceptional job in getting all the nuances there and the same goes for voice actors.