Dubbing vs Subtitling: Has Subtitling really won and why?

i saw the dardennes 'le fils' last night, and to be honest, virtually none of the dialogue matters at all. so tho dub wd be pointless. so much of the value of words is in their sound, and perhaps dubbing is rub because they do it so fast and the actors don't actually act, they just read.

perhaps it is something else also. does comedy work on a recognition level? ie, comedy is not about the other, it must be as close to home as possible, in order to succeed?

trudat about comedy; in all honesty hardly any of the foreign films i watch are at all funny. 'irma vep' is funny, but i can't remember any funny lines exactly.

What about Italy where until quite recently nearly all films were dubbed (including Italian films). Subtitles also have to take into account reading speeds, a lot slower than listening.

'goodbye lenin'? 'together'? these were funny, again i acn't remember good lines exactly, and even then what's mroe important: timing or delivery?

Reading might be slower than listening, but it's a lot quicker than speaking.

i read somewhere that in italy there are "star" dubbers,ie the guy who dubs george clooney,for example,is a star in his own right...
also,i liked the way in kill bill the dialogue seemed like it was meant to sound like it was a badly dubbed film from hong kong or somewhere...

The cultural specifity thing if possibly a misnomer, I actually think the reason we see less comedies and action films is the people in charge of buying and distributing foreign films avoid this area as they do not see it fit for an arthouse market. But foreign != arthouse.

The comedy in Amelie was mainly visual and anyway pretty light. Goodbye Lenin was more farce in nature (the setting possibly already as alien to modern Germans as to those of us in the West).

8 Femmes was a lousy musical too. Only one song was any good. ANd the subtitling of the songs lacked any lyricism.

Of course subtitles are massively distracting if you actually speak the language (though of course with dubbing you get no choice). Sometimes I think well travelled cineastes are pro the globalisation of the subtitle just so that they can still see English/US films in Japan, France etc etc.

cf 'code unknown'

So are we saying that post-syncing isn't strictly dubbing? Anyone see both versions of Spirited Away or mangas in general?

(i think there might be a grain of truth to the old gag about french audiences loving jerry lewis cuz his dubbed voice was all sexed up)

cdn't be much stanger than heston's actual performance as a 'mexican'.

I can understand the impulse to cringe when you hear dubbed dialogue that doesn't sync up with the lip movements, because it reminds us that film is artifice - but if you can get past that initial reaction, dubbing does have certain advantages - primarily that of freeing up your eyes to take in the visual action. Think of it as a convenience - like having an interpreter whispering in your ear while you attend a UN conference.

Bescause everyone seems less offensive in the subtitled version. Less barking and yelling.
There was another one, Ghost In The Shell I think, where the dialog was edited to be less offensive in English. Sexist lines about menstration were taken out from the openning scene. I've tried to make it a point to watch the subtitled version at least once after that one.

I don't remember that much barking and yelling. Although to our non-Japanese ears, the intonations of Japanese speech are bound to signify differently than they would to a native speaker. For instance, do people signal emotions in the same way in Japanese as they do in English in terms of inflection and speech patterns? If not, then there is a case for dubbing, because a thoughtful dubbing job could attempt to translate these inflections as well. Otherwise, we're just hearing noise that our brains can't process, because we don't have the training.

they don't put that much effort into dubbing!

anyway, if japanese ppl heear differently, then surely they see differently, and therefore the movie entire ought to be reshot for western eyes, no?

i understand this in theory,and this would especially be relevant to such a visual film as crouching tiger,but its a gut reaction i can't get past
mind you,i've never really tried,always just prefered subtitles,but i hadn't really thought about a lot of the points raised on this thread...

They do subtitles that appear on personal placards or something in the new big assed theaters. For the hearing impared supposedly so I don't know if they actually work. Heck thats half way there.

Sure, but how about at the theater where you don't have a choice in the matter? At the risk of sounding a bit extreme about the whole thing, dubbing NEVER makes justice to the actors. No matter how good the random actor doing the dubbing is, it will never be as good as the original. It doesn't matter if it's German or Japanese, the real thing is always much better -- it has the soul of the performance there. Also, dubbing has always striked me as a tool for people too lazy to read.

Of course, living in a Spanish-speaking country, I've seen subtitles in movies all my life, so I may be biased.

It's easier to subtitle animated films because the mouths only move in an approximation to the human mouth. Even so, there's a lengthy documentary in the Spirited Away DVD about how long it took to get it right.

Are reading speeds that much slower than listening? I've never found that (though I've never really had any problem with reading and watching)

I thought the same about Kill Bill: it seemed designed to avoid anything that could cause trouble in translating.

Actually the CTHD seems to have undergone some rewriting to match lips as well: very strange.

In theory a truly great dubbing could improve any film, but also a bad one can desroy it. A good subtitling can improve more than a good dubbing, in a Asterix stylee.

There's a bit of rabid-anime-fan nonsense in there as well, because there are cults around certain Japanese seiuyuu (voice actors), who release albums and fund anime and are often typecast - if you recognise the voice as being x seiyuu you've got a chance of working out what the character's likely to be like. In some cases, even, the character will have been created with the seiyuu in mind.

Subtitling is doubly distracting when you're familiar with both languages

Or, even worse, if you're a little familiar with both languages but not all that much. I went to see Zatoichi in Paris and, despite the fact that my Japanese is better than my French, my eye kept getting drawn to the subtitles - the letters were familiar, even if the language itself wasn't exactly my strong point. And it's a problem I've never had with films or anime subbed in Chinese, because I can't read hanzi (...isn't that the word?) at all.

My copy of Spirited Away is a Hong Kong VCD, dubbed into Mandarin on one side and Cantonese on the other, and with no subtitles whatsoever. I still know what's going on, though, so I don't much care.

...about as much as anybody watching that dream-on-film does, probably.

(well except in my dream, it wouldn't be Stephen Seagal, it would be Toshiro Mifune bellowing "I Kill You! With Swords!")

I have very little light to shed on this debate although I work in the subtitling 'industry' - I'm too involved with this stuff at the microscopic level to be able to make a case for subbing over dubbing. My head is full of the nuts and bolts of the discipline (750 characters per minute, no more than 12-frame overhang at the shot-change in for-translation templates, line break at sentence subclauses, SDH vs TT, etc, etc), and the semi-rigid application of these in-house rules is pretty much the only way to slog through a 104-min 1989 Kris Kristofferson/Cheryl Ladd movie about time-travel without going mad.

All the points about comedy are valid. If the secret of comedy is...

timing, then, unfortunately, I'm working to a different temporal agenda.

Of course a great deal of subtitling is for the hard-of-hearing and, even if the whole world goes dub crazy, at least I'll still have another dozen episodes of Allo Allo around the corner to keep me busy.

Akira is an interesting one for me because it's probably the only film I've watched about 5 or 6 times dubbed before finally viewing a subtitled version. Which was a rather interseting experience because there are so many parts of the script that the dubbed version just completely ignores. This was a revelation for me because there were so many parts of the film that suddenly made sense. This is assuming the subtitlers didn't just decide to add their own explanations of the events.

Enrique - you're thinking of Time of the Wolf in your first post

no, it definitely had vince and monica. it was set in like the 18th century and had this weird dragon creature. i'm pretty sure it's called 'brotherhood of the wolf'. also had the chick from 'rosetta'.

It's really bad in the news, where they run the original tone quietly in the background and then have the person say what they want him to have said -- on the other hand, the American media do this as well, just as badly.

Two great moments in German dubbing:

1. Airplane!: Nice white grandma type offers to translate for the two soul brothers on the jet: "It's ok, I speak the Lower Bavarian dialect". And she does, and they then talk to each other in said dialect.

2. The Simpsons: Homer runs into a statue at the Springfield tar pits: H: "Nein!" Lisa: "Ein Hirsch!" Marge: "Ein weibliches Hirsch!"

(ie bavarian video-porn baron being given a ripe put-on rural accent, purely to make him sound absurd given his milieu)

Souleymane Cisse, African film director, funds pretty6 much all of his filming these days on doing dubs of American films for the French audiences (French TV in particular). He has said that if there is a male black actor in a film then there is a 50% chance of it being him doing the dub. Which suggests an interesting idea, if Cisse always dubs Morgan Freeman then there is a degree of continuity to how you think he sounds, which again is less distracting.

The white subs on white background is infuriating, The Girl On The Bridge has a ten minute section which is unreadable. On a black and white film use yellow. At least DVD's you can put the subtitles outside the letterbocks.

Computa technology should make cueing and lipsync with pro-tools style pitch shift a lot easier.

'what's up tiger lily' is paradigmatic

What about Monkey and The Magic Roundabout, this kind of fits the suggestion above by Mark S that more time should go into the rewriting, potentially to use the visuals to mean something completely different to the original.

Also Pete maybe missed my point: big money is spent on dubbing in Germany, but it all goes to the actors and not the translators -- as a result, voices sync to lips and things are all very emotionally complex and appropriately acted -- until you realize that the last half hour of dialogue didn't have much to do with what was actually said on the English soundtrack.

the comedy argument is a good one though... I think I have seen and been amused by subtitled foreign language comedy, but I cannot remember any specific examples.

I will test this subtitled comedy no good thing when I see the second of Lucas Belvaux's trilogy films. The French found it funny.

The studio/film distributor choose their preferred authoring house and we then follow the authoring house rules for font size, colour, edging, antialiasing, placement, etc. White-on-white should never happen - there should always be a border on the text.

This only refers to switchable subtitle streams for DVD; for films where the studio have decided to employ their own 'burned-in' captions, anything goes.

Sean: Suspiria? I've just subbed that!

Case closed.

Subtitling is the reason why Scandinavians speak fairly good English compared to the dubbing-countries!

(As a parenthesis I think they showed South Park on Swedish tv with no subtitles and no dubbing for a while - just to preserve the original jokes & timing.)

I don't find subtitles annoying or distracting at all. Especially not compared to the sound not matching the lip movements. Christ, talk about destroying all sense of realism and emotional involvement in a movie!

But I suppose dubbing could be interesting from some verfremdungs-effekt perspective, or as a kitsch arty statement.

http://www.tvtome.com/images/shows/5/8/71-35.jpg

oh god yes. i saw [most of] godard's 'un movie commes les autres' (1968) 2 years ago. the film is todally fuxxored up and most ppl walked out of its premiere. i walked out with abt 2omin to spare. godard biographer colin macc@be was there and he didn't leave.

any hoo, the image track of the film is: some peopl talking in a field possibly outside a factory possibly near paris. their faces, and even bodies, are obscured, by like grass, etc. occasionally this is intercut with doc*mentary footage of the may 69 barricades.

the sound track is like a UN-style translator talking over the french voices on the same level of volume, so in the end you have to rely on the subtitles (not easy since they're in althusserian wank-talk).

not exactly 'bande a part'

vive la cinema

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0348/hoberman.php

There are swathes of background language in the film which are not subtitled. Indeed how do we cope with overlapping, fast talking language. Especially where the background info is suddenly important to the plot (Noi Albinois avalanche is apparent foreshadowed on the TV).

One of the problems with dubbing is one of the problems they always used to have with special effects. Since the effects (and the dub) were laid on a back projection the effects were always in focus and not subject to motion blur like the original film. Similar thing can be said about too good dubbing, it sounds like a radio play, not a film. But with better sound mixing technology it could be integrated into the onscreen world in a much more successful way.

Because it puts a bit of light into our otherwise drab news life. There is no reason why certain parts of documentaries or news should be funny. (But the "translator has accent too" suggestion above is probably the case).

For the same reason Nazis always have comedy German accents if it's a British film, yet British accents if it's an American film!

(I was drunk when I was told this, so I forget who told me.)

With for-translation templates, if background/radio chatter is clearly audible there will be an attempt to squeeze it in. There will become a point at which it's indistinct enough and/or conflicts too much with foreground dialogue for it to be ignored (a hearing audience can hear that a radio DJ is burbling away, if the sound mixer didn't deem it significant enough to make it reasonably audible, then it doesn't need translation).

The land of speech bubbles, pop-up captions and text tickers is a ruddy nightmare. Far more distracting than useful to the viewer, I think.

the original BRILLIANT Flashing Blade was a great example of how dubbing can work well, particularly when used on programmes aimed at children.

the spectacularly unfunny redubbing of the Flashing Blade with supposedly hilarious new dialogue was another step on the reclamation of my childhood by cockfarmers.

I still hate it when dialogue does not match the movement of the lips, even in english films where a profanity has been swapped, or even when the re-recording gets the line or timing wrong.

When you think back to your favourite scenes in movies that are subtitled, you stil lhear the main character's voice in your head, but now they are saying the line in english!

The subtitled version of Shaolin Soccer is better, only becuase it is longer.

The amazing thing was that I got used to it.

Also, my old living room had a traffic light right outside the window and between the sirens and car radios, I could only hear the TV half the time, anyway, so subtitles won out.

http://www.bangingtunes.com/forum/topic/t22233/

The Chinese dubbing and English subtitling of Star Wars : Revenge of the Sith.

I think dubbing only works if it's an animated film but then again, I've only ever watched dubbed anime.

If a decent amount of money was put into dubbing (which i admit is possibly unlikely, though who knows if the Chinese market opens up) would it be better?

I'd rather not leave the sonic environment of the scene in front of me every time a character speaks.

It all depends. I watched the movie Bandits (the Willis/Thornton one) with French dubbing and English subtitles and it was substantially funnier. The dubbed French had a lot more irritation in it which improved an otherwise fast-talk but flat buddy movie.

Actually, there's no reason why the studio couldn't provide each local dubbing studio with some enviromental cues or blend in some anechoic recording of the voice-actors into their own multi-channel mix. It would be well-freakin' rad.

and seemingly to try and hide the dubbing, the English is synced up with the movements of the actors mouths, so it sounds utterly fake and stupid anyway:

'I... will kill... you... you bas... tard!'

Some dubbed kung fu is great though (The Lengend of Fong Sai Yuk is pretty good dubbed, which is just as well as you can't get the subbed version).

in a sense, all films are dubbed.

Dubbing is a fudge but subtitling maybe more so.

Hence commissions like "I want the sound of baby polar bears gamboling across slightly wet snow".

A packet of frozen garden peas falling down primary school steps.

(I don't think I'd be especially good at it, to be honest - no better than anyone else who likes arsing about with microphones. It just seems wonderful. I bet there's just the same office politics and managerial incompetence... "He filled the gravel tray...with sand. Wet sand! And he gets paid more than me. I wouldn't trust him to put a pop-guard on a Neumann.")

subtitling versus signing. i hate it when i record a programme on bbc 4 at night now and a 1/4 of the screen is occupied by a woman doing sign language. they could at least indicate that it would be signed.

Dubbing a cartoon makes sense. Dubbing live action is pretty appalling most of the time--unless it's a Godzilla movie or something. Then it just adds to the camp.

Can't stand subtitles. If you look away for a second, you have to rewind. Movies are a visual medium, but you don't necessarily want to have your eyes locked on the tv when you're sitting there in bed.

We're getting into Chinese and Korean films a lot in my house and sometimes there isn't even a dubbed version on the disc, which can disappointing. We just discovered that on our copy of Once Upon A Time in China, the dubbed version is included as a Special Feature, rather than an option under Languages.

anyone who watches dubbed live action is a savage imo.

Unless a subtitled film is just boring enough to not hold my interest, I generally forget I'm reading subtitles and watching action in tandem within about five minutes.

But you can't walk out of the room and still follow the plot.

u can't hear actors' inflections with dubbing. that sucks.

It's getting on my nerves when I notice bad translations. Sometimes it's obvious the translator doesn't have any inkling of pop culture or is not following the scenes. Urgh.

gah dubbing is the worst unless you want to laugh at it

is it usual to change the soundtrack on a dub? i recently wathced laputa castle in the sky in dubbed and subtitled form and noticed that all of the sound effects and part of the musical soundtrack had been updated on the newer subtitled version

The dubbing on Let the Right One It nearly ruined the movie for me, it was hard not to laugh at it during several parts.

It = In obviously

I never really used to think about the quality of translations for subtitles but after reading about the controversy surrounding the job they did on Let The Right One In it's got me wondering. Luckily enough i saw it with the original subtitles

Link:
http://screenrant.com/let-the-right-one-in-dvd-scandal-kofi-6533/"> http://screenrant.com/let-the-right-one-in-dvd-scandal-kofi-6533/

I didn't even check to see if our Netflix for Let the Right One In had subtitles actually. It just started playing dubbed and, since my wife prefers watching them without subtitles, I let it play. It wasn't awful, but there were a couple scenes that weren't supposed to be as funny as they ended up being.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeHA-19UT6I

I cannot bear dubbing.

vs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5eNTsKKFQE

yeah i really do believe that dubbing is totally fucked, subtitles are the only way to go. i've never had problems following the action and following my reading...

I just watched a bunch of movies in English over the wkend with subtitles on. I had the air conditioner running, so in order to hear the whispers, I had to turn it up so far that action scenes would have woken everyone else up. Hence, subtitles. If I'm watching a movie in bed, I'm not going anywhere anyway.

i really enjoy watching dubbing with the subtitles on simultaneously. i call it "dubtitling"

Reading that bit about "Let" should come as an important lesson to us all: The only thing stupider than monolinguals arguing about translation is wasting your time reading that argument.

Some reasons why I think subtitles have "won":

Good actors speak their lines with force and clarity to deliver their full emotional impact. Reproducing that effect in a dubbed translation always results in a shipwreck.

For example, the original lines have a definite pace, a syllable count and rhythm of emphasis that are simply impossible to reproduce in translation without doing violence to their meaning. If you ignore the pace, syllable count and emphasis, you may as well be writing subtitles.

Face it, the dubbing actors are often less skilled than the original actors. Not only that, but they are grossly handicapped by trying to match their dubbed lines to the original actors's motions and expressions, which can never match up correctly. The result is lines spoken too fast and too choppily.

The only kind of movie that can be dubbed with anything approaching success is something like Godzilla or the Hong Kong kung-fu movies, where the acting never counted for much, the dialogue is only trying to move the plot ahead or to convey the simplest, most cartoonish emotions, and the inadvertant comedy introduced by mismatching lip motions and audio can be taken as a harmless addition to the entertainment.

are there any movies with really accurate subtitles? (I mean accurate enough to be a rosetta stone if future civilizations need one)
my language skills are pretty poor but they are enough to suspect that the great majority of subtitles take a lot of liberties to the point where it feels like it is some drunken dude recounting what is being said, and it would feel more honest if there was an actual drunken dude in a superimposed audio track narrating what's going on, like in those Russian bootleg DVDs.

surely bad translation is a problem in both subtitling and dubbing.

Really accurate subtitles would be useless in most films, because you couldn't read them fast enough. Too many words in most cases.

English language voiceover acting sucks because they don't throw the money at it that other countries do. Good dubbing is in itself very disturbing.

The problems in translation are different for subtitles and dubbing: a dubbing translation has to match the mouth and action, subtitles have to be readable in the time the line is uttered, and most people don't read very fast. In both cases, some suckage is inevitable.

Once saw "Pretty Baby" on Polish tv; drunken guy grunting "but Mother, I am a virgin" or something like that while the original soundtrack played quietly in the background was very, very funny.

Correction: good dubbing is NOT in itself very disturbing. Grunting Polish guys speaking Brooke Shields' lines is very disturbing but hilarious.

subtitles
pros = how Jamie Foxx learned Cantonese in Booty Call; also makes many jokes somehow funnier
con = always convince me I know way more French than I thought I did, which I don't; also bad fonts

dubbing
pro = allows us to watch English-language sitcoms where suddenly everyone's speaking German
con = consistently just lousy

I don't know that I've ever actually seen a dubbed movie with the exception of Miyazaki. (I've seen clips of martial-arts films here and there but never a whole one.)

I never really used to think about the quality of translations for subtitles but after reading about the controversy surrounding the job they did on Let The Right One In it's got me wondering.

I usually think about this whenever I see subtitles for a European film that have obviously been by a British company. The references to loos and lifts makes me aware that someone is making choices for how to translate the dialogue, and some of those choices might be better than others.

That stuff is supposed to be localised, so that the NTSC version of a disc doesn't feature British English spellings or terms. Whether it actually is not depends on who is paying...

that thinking-I-know-French joke is maybe relevant in those terms: often I'll catch just enough to spend a lot of a film going "wait, that's not exactly what she said."

just like literature, it's translation, sort of a new item hopefully assembled by people with care and respect for the original and all of that -- the part that gets me about the Let the Right One In thing is that the DVD release was essentially offering a different product (a new translation) from the theatrical release, to an extent that it substantially changed the experience for people in ways they weren't expecting

often I'll catch just enough to spend a lot of a film going "wait, that's not exactly what she said."

sometimes this is more entertaining than the movie itself

xxp Hm, come to think of it, I see the British translations mostly in the theater.

it's funny, actually, how the example on that blog -- "you can jerk off at home" versus "time to go home" or whatever -- probably makes it seem to fans like the latter is just bowdlerized, whereas yeah, it's just as likely that the former was used in an effort to spice up or American-teen-ize the thing or add humor or any of a million profit-type concerns

Did anyone ever see The Count of Monte Cristo with Depardieu from the late 90's? I think Bravo or some cable channel showed it. Interestingly, they didn't use subtitles. The painstakingly placed the titles close to the person speaking, making it far easier to follow their performance.

I just want to give a shoutout to whoever is dubbing Cartman for Taiwanese South Park. You sound exactly like Cartman -- awesome job!
(apparently the taiwanese version is extremely localized, with scripts entirely rewritten to reflect local politics and urban slang, and they therefore had no obligation or incentive to maintain any cartman-fidelity, but they did, so good on them)

English shows dubbed in Spanish are the funniest shit ever to me

my favorite is Seinfeld in Spanish

I saw most of that movie about the college radio show, in Spanish. It's got Liv Tyler in it? That one.

there was this lazy misspent afternoon once where I knew how to say stuff like "it was a scratch" and "master of my domain" in Spanish

Laurel do you mean Empire Records??

(suburban record store, Anthony LaPaglia, young Renee Zellweger, Robin Tunney with shaved head?)

Yes! That's it. All I remember is a scene with Liv Tyler and she's...on a roof? Why is she on a roof?

She tried to fuck a rock star and chickened out.

i completely disagree that "the real emotion of the original" is guaranteed to be lost in a dub. dubbing is an art. if the script has been tailored well to the image edit voice actors can turn in great work. also keep in mind that many lines even in the original version of a movie will be "looped" or "adr"ed weeks after the fact in a recording studio, either because that particular bit of audio had something wrong with it or because the director thought of something new after the shooting was over. do those bits of dialogue jump out at you as "false"? not really.

anyone who wants to see how good dubbing can be should watch the new line cinema dub of "rumble in the bronx" w/jackie chan.

I love subbing cause it lets me get all the jokes in the BBC "The Office"...there's so many good tossed off one-liners and one-worders that I totally missed the first time around with no subs (lol American)

interesting fact: a great many of HK films are dubbed, including even the Cantonese language tracks. this is to cut costs on shooting; actors don't have to waste time getting the lines perfectly right, and this also allows them to do dubs in other languages like Mandarin quickly so that they can get the films to market faster

^see also Italian films til about 30 (?) years ago

yeah, outside of Asian and Mexican films, the only ones I see that are dubbed as opposed to subtitled are Italian.

IIRC a lot of 8 1/2 was dubbed wasn't it?

anyone who wants to see how good dubbing can be should watch the new line cinema dub of "rumble in the bronx" w/jackie chan.

But why would you want to since the New Line version is twenty minutes shorter and missing a couple entire scenes?

because i like action movies to get in and get out, plus the dub is seriously worth it. it's just astonishingly well done. also my concern for the artistic integrity of a jackie chan movie approaches zero the more i think about it.

im trying to apply for a subtitling job at the mo though i have to complete a task about how to approach subtitling different programs (news, comedy, drama etc). cant seem to google much about it at all. :|

Best thing you can do titchy is to watch the different sorts of programmes with the subtitles - then you can see how they're done differently. You'll probably notice that comedies and dramas with dense dialogue will sometimes have three lines of subtitles for instance, with lines sometimes appearing as they're spoken (timing is important in drama, comedy, and especially sport and quizzes), whereas news tends to have two (especially since news programmes have quite a lot of information on screen that you don't want to obscure - remember also that you ideally don't want to obscure the mouth of anyone who is speaking - deaf viewers often use the mouth as a cue).

In dramas you might want to think about whether it's acceptable to have subtitles hanging over frame changes. Reading speed is important as well - you don't really want to go above 200wpm - what can you afford to edit out in a news programme, what can be edited out in a comedy?

The way to approach it is to look at the sort of information it's most essential you convey for a given programme. In the case of a comedy that means that tone is going to be quite important, so you may have a different emphasis than in a documentary.

How are you going to identify off-screen speakers in drama? What are the potential problems with breaking news on a news programme? What are the problems with dramas from other countries - for instance how much do you want to convey slang?

What about contextual tags (APPLAUSE) for instance? When are they necessary or appropriate?

My personal approach would be that subtitles should not be a distraction - you don't want too much screen furniture, and that literalism (trying to convey every single word) is frequently not appropriate, both for reading speed but also for more general ease of reading. Research suggests however that many subtitle users would prefer literalism.

also keep in mind that many lines even in the original version of a movie will be "looped" or "adr"ed weeks after the fact in a recording studio, either because that particular bit of audio had something wrong with it or because the director thought of something new after the shooting was over. do those bits of dialogue jump out at you as "false"? not really.

a lot of the time they do!!!

here's the s k y s t y l e g u i d e

http://www.sendspace.com/file/733x4b

yes but max you are a freak, you have to remember that

freakwood max

here's the s k y s t y l e g u i d e

Just for the task mind, I wouldn't necessarily worry about a lot of the minutiae in that style guide - just show an awareness of the issues involved. Some of the information is out of date as well - like the end box going missing; teletext is used less and less, most subtitling tends to be seen in digital format now. Research has shown that higher reading speed levels than the ones specified there are possible as well, but it will depend on the programme.

i still await the a multitrack standard for consumer audio equipment that would apply to both movies and regular music CDs. they'd be "soft keys" in that each media artifact could designate different functions for them. you could have faders for "diegetic music" "non-diegetic music" "sound effects" "dialogue" etc, and for CDs you could have "rhythm track" "vocals" etc.. dubbing would just be another track on another fader. problem solved - NEXT

"^see also Italian films til about 30 (?) years ago"

even now a lot of scenes are dubbed - and not always because of costs.

Here, almost 100% of foreign films are dubbed: generally they do a decent job, sometimes the results are head-scratching. I remember this 80's movie (I think it was Danko), where "Dirty Harry" for unfathomable reasons was translated as "Larry Latrine".

I wonder if I've had some professional dealings with GamalielRatsey, without knowing it?

Uh, possibly... Tho I'm as much in the dark as you are if it's the case.

thanks gamalie. much appreciated.

On the reading speed thing - some studios have absolutely insisted on a verbatim approach for some years now (whether that's a response to hard-of-hearing pressure groups and the concept of editing-as-censorship) and that's led to a loss of editing skills within the pool of transcribers. The notion of a sequence of dense dialogue being elegantly précised into a few, readable captions is long gone now. Just cram it in.

"I'm not sure" is what should've appeared before I closed the brackets there. See - editing is not always a good idea.

Yeah, agreed about that 'trying to cram everything in' approach now being prevalent. It doesn't require as much skill to do that either, so you don't have to worry as much about training and getting good candidates.

The thing is about consultation is that a lot of depends on the sort of question you ask. If you ask people, do you want everything put in, or do you want the material edited and for the subtitles to stay on the screen longer, people will understandably say 'want everything'.

But vetting everything can result in poor pacing, subtitles hanging over shot changes, lack of clarity as to who is speaking.

In live subtitling it ignores the fact that when we speak in an unscripted way we use an awful lot of hedging words and time-creating words.

Can feel like a case of people not actually wanting what they think they want. Horribly patrician I know, but there it is.

I'd say yes it's definitely won. Thing that annoys me to no end is often on TV they will be interviewing someone who's first language is not English and even though they are speaking fluent English, they subtitle it because of the accent. Cos you know, "they ain't 'merican's."

Some times I appreciate that when the accent is quite heavy -- better to have understood their point than be left with, "That man seemed nice, but he sure did sound funny!"

I thought those Polish voiceover guys mentioned upthread didn't act out the film but just sort of narrated the plot.