Subtitles: Classic or Dud?

I have no problem with subtitles, but I do think that the absence of dubbing as a mainstream cinema option is maybe a shame. Yes yes it detracts from the film, but seeing as a large section of the population doesn't 'do' subtitles, surely it's better than nothing. Our no-dubbing culture contributes the ingrained association between 'inaccessible and arty' and 'foreign'.

English language films in France are often shown dubbed, yes?

As for film subtitles, I never really consider whether a film's got them or not. You miss out on A LOT though surely if you boycott all subtitled films.

NB. Watching Top of the Pops with subtitles = classic!

The dubbed version of Crouching Tiger on the DVD is terrible though I agree with you that the option is an interesting one. The thing which struck me is that art-house films are the ones which probably subtitle the worst, an action film after all won't have that much dialogue (twixt the gunplay).

Last dubbed films on generalish release in the UK were Taxi, poss. Taxi 2 and Asterix & Obeliex vs Caesar (with quite annoying Terry Jones written dialogue).

Also subtitles - for the fast reader - can seem achingly slow. Not to mention the way that what you read will not match reactions, work in fast arguments or overlapping speech.

As mentioned on the other thread - compare cinema dubbing to translations of foreign literature.

Much much worse than subtitling - the earphone commentaries they have at the NFT!

I'm a fast reader, and glad of it with subtitles because if I were slow I'd not get to look at the rest of the screen much. The only time I really don't like them is when I can't read them. I started watching Man Bites Dog on Film Four the other night, and the titles kept vanishing into the background, so I eventually gave up.

I'd rather everyone made films in English for my convenience (these unreasonable foreigners!), but I'll happily accept the slight personal disadavantage of subtitling as a tiny price for the joy of watching a Kurosawa or Renoir, for example.

Dubbing = classic. One of my fondest memories is of seeing 'The A- team' dubbed into Spanish on holiday in the Picos de Europa when I was a kiddy. Horrible fuzzy reception & Hispanic Madman Murdoch's characterisation was just _so_ amazingly wacky. Is it the same voice actors getting the work over and over again, or is it just me hearing treble?

http://www.angelfire.com/rings/ttt-subtitles/080-100/two-towers-06.jpg

When I think back to scenes from Apocolypto or Mystery Train, it's weird that I can hear the actors' voices in my memory saying the lines in English that I originally read on the screen. If you're able to read as well as a fifth-grader, you can subconsciously forget that you're reading subtitles within five minutes. Great way to experiment with a second language.

I hear the Japanese lines actually. (No, I actually don't. But I like to pretend I do because sukoshi Nihongo wakaru yo.)

I still stand by my 2002 opinion: undertitles all the way to the end of the film.

How could they have dubbed "Mystery Train" with that whole Natchez/matches dialogue on the train?

Just watched a DVD of Denys Arcand's Stardom. English, but as I sometimes do (hearing fading with everything else), I had the English subtitles running. More than one foul-up--best one was Cy Twombly rendered as "Side Tremblay."

I was watching webinars with the automatic close captions on last year and that can be really amusing. What teh programme hears things as.
Always wonder to what extent that chinese whisper element becomes cognitive for people who don't know the subject at all.
Though maybe recognising clunkers detracts from being able to give full attention to the subject in hand

Main thing i was coming on this thread or one like it to ask about was what people thought of having to edit SRTs. I keep finding the ones I'm using being way out of sync even if adjusted to fit where teh start of conversation in the film starts. Like internal structure is not actually in time with itself anyway.
So wondered if people did actually spend much time adjusting the ones they get either with the torrented video file or from whatever subtitle site they can get them from. Like if you have a reasonably accurate translation that is out of time is it actually worth the effort to get the timing right. I'm assuming that people would automatically want to have the subtitle somewhere in the vicinity of the words spoken in the foreign language. You can't be out of time and still follow how responses etc fit to what is said etc.
I've been finding that in some cases it is possible to get an alternative d/ld of teh film with subtitles hardcoded. Though am finding that my tv can not recognise some of the apparently hardcoded subtitles. had to get a fresh set for O Drakos a few days ago though the subtitles did show when i tried playing teh file on my computer. & the video transforming from d/lding from youtube appears to strip subtitles though may just be my tv. Wondering if that is something I can actually change programming on the tv for though not sure what i can do with atht that won't have a longer term effect that I can't tell how positive it would be.

A while back I was downloading a lot of old japanese movies and having to deal with this. Most of the time syncing with the first conversation fixed the subs for the whole movie. When that didn't work (the subs drifting as the movie progressed, for whatever reason) I'd look for a different set of subtitles.

The worst situation I had was a recent tv show where the subs kept drifting at certain points--I'm guessing the subs were timed for video which still had commercial breaks (whereas my video had them removed). In that case I had to do a new sync at each point, which is the most extensive re-timing I've done.

Ultimately it's not a hassle if it's something I want to watch.

My wife and I watch pretty much everything with English subtitles - we watch on my laptop which doesn't have very loud volume even at max, and my wife has an easier time reading than listening. We run into the situation Kim describes a lot, where the subtitle desyncs at every commercial break. but VLC player has keyboard shortcuts to adjust sync, which makes it a snap. Sometimes we'll run into an srt file that slowly keeps desyncs, like it's at the wrong running speed, and then I'll have to search for a new subtitle

Perhaps this is relevant more to captions than subtitles, but over the last few years, I’ve started turning on subtitles for most things I watch, even if it ruins the occasional punchline by displaying it before it’s spoken. It’s not that I can’t hear dialog, but often it’s hard for me to decipher or process what has been said due to dialog volume levels and my own mediocre hearing. If I don’t turn them on, I’m constantly turning up dialog, then scrambling to turn it down once music or sound effects kick in.

It’s frustrating how every platform seems to do its own thing! I set my preferences in the master Roku menu (specifically, ditching the black bar behind subtitles) yet there’s no consistency across services, and often adjusting on the service's website just affects watching through the website. I suppose subtitles are still too often seen as a secondary concern, though perhaps I’m just ignorant of some technical hurdle that explains it.

Seems like much could be done with subtitles that aren’t, though again, maybe this is just a technical limitation. I downloaded subs for the recent Adam Curtis doc, and loved how it used italics and one color for dialog spoken in archival clips, another color for narration, and a third for song lyrics. (Another lack of standardization I’ve noticed: some programs shows subtitle lyrics, others just put the "[Song Title] plays", others skip it completley). Conversely, hate when shows move the subtitles to accommodate post-theme credits—the Parks and Recreation DVDs do this, so there is a block of text over characters’ faces for the first few minutes.

maybe this is just a technical limitation

I've seen some japanese tv shows where there are subtitles in different fonts/colors/screen placement for the various aspects of what needs to be translated, be it the main dialogue, narration, on-screen text, etc. I imagine that takes a ton of time and effort to produce, but the translators are doing it just as a hobby.

First of all, different clients/platforms have their own style guides - and some will pay for creation, some only want repurposing of existing (years old) broadcast captions. Hence a mish-mash of stylistics.
Then there's the deliverable formats themselves; the system I work on has over 130 varieties of subtitle export file. Binary, plain text, proprietary, open-source, TTML, side-car, image-based for sub-picture stream or muxing or burn-in, grid-based caption for TV decoding, etc etc.

A lot of the crowdsourced stuff for Japanese anime uses Aegis, and the SubStation Alpha format, which is really powerful (fades, colours, animations, typefaces, etc).
The standard TTML deliverables for most streaming platforms are simpler (font families which map to whatever fonts are locally available to the device/web-player; subtitles for the same show on the same service won't even look the same on iPad vs laptop for example).
For DVD/Blu-ray/cinema, it's either TIFFs/PNGs rendered over picture (so complete control of look/size/colour in the deliverable) or TTML plus a bundled TTF (much the same).

SRT (in its original SubRip incarnation) is the simplest of all - text and timings. There are extensions to that format (numpad-style placement, CSS), which may or may not be supported by the playout device. If you've got a "ripped" SRT and it's out of sync then it was likely prepped for a different framerate or a different cut.

yeah may need to brush up on things like framerate.

Have been wondering if there was an ad thing at the beginning of a couple of things I've tried to watch from what people have said.

So looks like people aren't actually messing around with a given SRT then, did wonder. I mean I have limited experience of using them and just saw that they were basically textfiles with some processing. So would have the possibility if somebody had the dedication. Assuming that subtitles are actually what they are supposed to be and translation is as close as semantically possible or however one wants to put that.
Like i am enjoying seeing the words turning up as subtitles relate to the words I'm hearing. Do have a large enough vocabulary to see how a not quite commonplace usage of a word equates to the word in whatever European language. Like it all goes back to like Latin, greek and various interborrowings and things. So maybe i should sit down and try to learn another couple of languages.

well getting through some pretty good stuff so hope i can keep it up.

like if you have a good translation may be good to start from a bad timing and edit to a good one but not sure quite how labour intensive the process is.

So wondered if people did actually spend much time adjusting the ones they get either with the torrented video file or from whatever subtitle site they can get them from.

Sure do (I use Subs Factory: https://www.subsfactory.app)

wtf @ Channel 4 using subtitles for a guy from Manchester (I think) in this Facing Terror documentary.

Subscene shut down a couple of days ago, but there's multiple full dumps of the site out there:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1b5rxc2/subscenecom_full_dump/

Recent release of Une femme est une femme is dedicated to the memory of Lenny Borger.