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.

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.