Inside the Dying Art of Subtitling (cnet.com) 116
The wildly popular series Squid Game drew criticism for its English subtitles. Just how did those happen? CNET News: Subtitlers contend with unrealistic expectations, tight deadlines and competition from clunky machine translation. Often, their work goes underappreciated, under the radar. Sometimes Uludag would be sent a file to translate at 11 p.m. -- "and they would say we need it by 8 a.m." Without skilled subtitlers, movies such as historic Oscar winner Parasite are lost in translation. Yet the art of subtitling is on the decline, all but doomed in an entertainment industry tempted by cheaper emerging artificial intelligence technologies. Subtitlers have become a dying breed.
And this had been the predicament before the world started watching a little show called Squid Game. In 28 days, Squid Game leapfrogged Bridgerton as Netflix's most popular series ever. It also inadvertently started a global conversation about bad subtitles. While critics lauded the South Korean battle royale-themed drama for its polished production values, gripping story and memorable characters, many accused Netflix of skimping on the quality of Squid Game's English subtitles.
A prime example: Ali, the Pakistani laborer, shares a touching moment with Sang Woo, an embezzler who graduated from Korea's top university. Sang Woo suggests Ali call him hyung, instead of sajang-nim or "Mr. Company President." The term hyung literally translates as "older brother," a term used by a man to address an older man with whom he has formed a closer bond. That's Ali and Sang Woo. Yet, the line "Call me hyung" was translated as "Call me Sang Woo." A rare moment of compassion and humanity, amid all the gloom and gore, was lost. [...]
Yet Netflix, which abandoned its in-house subtitling program Hermes one year after its launch in 2017, is interested in a different area of translation: dubbing. It's not hard to see why. For example, 72% of Netflix's American viewers said they prefer dubs when watching Spanish hit Money Heist, Netflix's third most popular show ever. Unfairly criticized, underfunded and facing a lack of support from the entertainment industry, subtitlers are on the brink. At least the Squid Game controversy illuminated an unsung fact: Good subtitles are an exceptionally difficult art.
And this had been the predicament before the world started watching a little show called Squid Game. In 28 days, Squid Game leapfrogged Bridgerton as Netflix's most popular series ever. It also inadvertently started a global conversation about bad subtitles. While critics lauded the South Korean battle royale-themed drama for its polished production values, gripping story and memorable characters, many accused Netflix of skimping on the quality of Squid Game's English subtitles.
A prime example: Ali, the Pakistani laborer, shares a touching moment with Sang Woo, an embezzler who graduated from Korea's top university. Sang Woo suggests Ali call him hyung, instead of sajang-nim or "Mr. Company President." The term hyung literally translates as "older brother," a term used by a man to address an older man with whom he has formed a closer bond. That's Ali and Sang Woo. Yet, the line "Call me hyung" was translated as "Call me Sang Woo." A rare moment of compassion and humanity, amid all the gloom and gore, was lost. [...]
Yet Netflix, which abandoned its in-house subtitling program Hermes one year after its launch in 2017, is interested in a different area of translation: dubbing. It's not hard to see why. For example, 72% of Netflix's American viewers said they prefer dubs when watching Spanish hit Money Heist, Netflix's third most popular show ever. Unfairly criticized, underfunded and facing a lack of support from the entertainment industry, subtitlers are on the brink. At least the Squid Game controversy illuminated an unsung fact: Good subtitles are an exceptionally difficult art.
Anime Subtitling (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember back in my college days when we had subtitled Maison Ikkoku, the translations we had weren't bad but they certainly weren't great either. We would have to correct the translations to make more sense because while they were "translated", but many times the meaning would be lost in the translation and even more if you didn't understand the scenes or even the previous scenes that setup the context.
We had no idea what we were doing but luckily we had someone that at least understood some Japanese as me another guy were just very particular about the start and stop codes for each previous translations.
To say those Saturday afternoons/evenings felt like an endless loop would be an understatement.
*Godai-kun has entered the chat*
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As one living in Sweden where we have basically only subtitles and they are usually pretty good even though there are occasional cases that are strange because they are "untranslateable". "Untranslateable" is mostly when you have certain jokes and sayings.
Every time we experience dubbed movies and shows we just cringe badly. Dubbing also takes away a lot of local character of the movies and shows.
Only animated are generally dubbed well, but then it's not as obvious that the dubbing isn't really breaking any
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Another weird thing is that I've watched several foreign shows with subtitles turned on and which were apparently ALSO dubbed into English...
And the subtitles and English dubbing don't match. Person on-screen says, "Hey! Get back to work!", subtitle said, "Are you lazy? Back to work!"
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The sub and dub can be different because they have different requirements. Dubs have to match the timing- and frequently the approximate mouth movements- of the original. It's much easier in a sub, which doesn't have those extra requirements and thus can focus on getting the shade of meaning right.
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I started watching the dub of Babylon Berlin (which was exceptionally well dubbed) but it suffered from that same issue. It felt too jarring to be a few episodes in and switch the language.
Side note, when i watch BBC iPlayer with subtitles, they are colour-coded to the actor (and sometimes even positioned on the screen to give a cue as to who is speaking). I'm sure that takes more effort to do, but it's a real
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Re:Anime Subtitling (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time we experience dubbed movies and shows we just cringe badly. Dubbing also takes away a lot of local character of the movies and shows.
Dubbing is much worse. It doesn't just take away the voice character of the original actor, it's often constrained in time so the translations are constrained to having approx the same number of syllables as the original. Languages don't work that way.
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Dubbing can also be an enhancement, as has been shown by Rainer Brandt, a German dub author and actor. "The Persuaders" (known in Germany as "Die Zwei") was a more or less serious series with Roger Moore and Tony Curtis that didn't fare too well in the original but was a riot in German because Brandt made the dialogues a lot more interesting and funny [youtube.com]. He added lines spoken by characters with the back to the camera and also broke the 4th wall routinely to create a joke. E.g. "why do you say that?" "So the i
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It's just that Americans are, as we tend to put it, hopelessly provincial, and not very open at all to different cultures. Heck, even British TV shows tend to only be elegible for export to the US in "remade" form, not as the original, dubbed or subbed either way.
In part, while some people in the US are admittedly "hopelessly provincial", I think a part of this is simply because US citizens are far less exposed to other languages, as a huge percentage of the world, including science and tech, all speak English as a common tongue. When you already speak a near-universal language, it's much less compelling to learn to speak an alternate language.
Another factor is that the US is huge, and we have English speaking northern neighbors. Only our neighbors to the south s
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Or just travel/live in certain parts of Florida, New York, or most of the SW US. Sure you can get by with English only, but Spanish can be critical.
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Anime has excellent subtitles in the vast majority of cases. Your example is from the early 1980s. Even things like Ah! My Goddess! from the late 80s has great subtitles, with the plot-related honorifics preserved. In the versions that didn't have that originally, the re-releases add it.
Luckily, netfux isn't a usual source of anime, so they're not doing any damage in that area.
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Subtitling Japanese (and undoubtedly many other languages) is kind of difficult, because there's obviously a ton of cultural nuance that is almost impossible to convey if you try to convert to normal English speech. There's no way to do a straightforward, lossless conversion, and have it still sound like normal English speech.
For example, even something as mundane as personal titles can be tricky, since there really isn't an exact one-to-one mapping between Japanese and English forms of addressing someone.
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On the other hand, a lot of subtitles are just crap. I don't speak Japanese but I do recognize titles, character's names, honorifics... and often the translations sub one for another. Even if it doesn't change the feeling of a scene, it just irritates me to read one while hearing another.
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Oh, sure. Some translators are not very careful or respectful of the work. There are plenty of sloppy mistakes, as you mentioned, both in translation mistakes or English spelling / grammar. Or there are sometimes weird decisions, like just using a transliteration "onsen" instead of translating to "hot springs," which I don't understand. But worse that that is a recent trend of some translators to deliberately alter the meaning of dialog in very substantial ways, possibly because the original lines offen
In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
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It would be 72% of the people who answered, not 72% of the people asked.
And the implication is that 28% will be unhappy with their service unless they do both well. That's a huge number. And in this case, a big portion of that 28% will be looking elsewhere. Maybe they can't always leave, but they'll be wanting to leave, they'll be ripe to switch, because if you prefer subs you want subs.
Personally, on the services I use if it doesn't have subs I didn't even watch it. It doesn't exist to me. It doesn't count
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W H O O S H
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I believe you have those numbers reversed.
Outsourced QA (Score:2)
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Youtube... IMO this translation problem is going to completely disappear in 10 years due to the availability of high quality machine translation
I hope so, currently yt's machine translation thinks all Korean media is pornography, which is weird, because pornography is illegal in Korea. So it seems their current AI is making weird presumptions about euphemisms, which of course are always wrong in these cases.
For example, Hyejeong cooks birthday lunch for her mom, and the subs claim she's talking about masturbation, instead of thank-you-for-raising-me.
bad translations (Score:2)
When I watch spanish language shows with subtitles, I find the translations comical - a really clean plain version of what was actually said. A lot is lost in subtitles.
Pikey Subtitles (Score:3)
Noting some fun with subtitles in the movie Snatch [wikipedia.org] here [tvtropes.org]:
Mickey (Brad Pitt) is deliberately unintelligible as a response to complaints about hard-to-understand British actors in the director's previous film, and at certain points the film's subtitles resort to question marks. The DVD commentary reveals that Pitt came up with the gibberish on his own and even he has no idea what he is supposed to be saying.
There is an option on the DVD to turn on "Pikey Subtitles," and display what Mickey and other Pikey characters are saying, but at one point even they are stumped and resort to the aforementioned "???".
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If you dub... (Score:3)
You still need a solid translation to have a script for dub. So you can't get to a decent dub without material for a decent subtitle track.
There's more specific work to do, but no more work than you need for captioning for hearing impaired audiences anyway. There's more possible work to do around layout, but it's been a long long time since I have seen anyone put significant effort into subtitling layout anyway.
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The least they could do is move the closed captions out of the way of any open captions, but they can't even be bothered to do that. Half the time they cover them up with something unimportant, like *Foreign Language*.
I prefer subtitles (Score:2)
Personally, I prefer subtitles. If the original content is in a language I have some knowledge of I find it difficult not to try to lipread the original dialogue, which gets really distracting really fast.
...laura
Industry wide problem with deadlines (Score:2)
Deepfaking Dubs (Score:1)
Movie subtitling sucks unnecessarily (Score:2)
First, it is retarded when the overlay subtitles over in-movie dialog subtitles for example when they are displaying a location/time or text in the movie. HD format is 16 by 9 aspect ratio whereas movies are more rectangular. When they are showing a film in letterbox mode, they display subtitles over the movie instead of within the horizontal black bars underneath. What is up with that?
Subtitling: the Dying Art (Score:2)
How could you miss this opportunity?
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Anime Nerd here (Score:2)
Broadcast is always hit or miss, and streaming is more or less broadcast. It's been like that since I was a kid watching fansubs.
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Fan subs are usually they best. They are willing to assume a minimal amount of familiarity with Japanese language (things like -san and -chan honourifics), and don't do stupid things like trying to translate jokes about English to jokes about Spanish.
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Plus, they don't have to, and usually don't, care about "wrong" language. Japanese culture is a lot less, let's say, coddling. Which is weird considering their obsession with tact that makes even the proverbial stereotypical English gentleman look like a brute, but some of the things that "go" in Japanese in Anime would never fly on TV here, and can't even be done in a commercial release without causing a shitstorm.
No problem for a fansubber, of course. It's not like they have to deal with "decency" laws th
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Japanese has multiple levels of politeness. The one selected can often tell you a lot about the relationship between two characters. There isn't really a good way to translate it, so fansubs often just use the Japanese word and expect the viewer to learn it.
For example, "mother" in Japanese is "ka". Normally people address their mother as "o-ka san", with the "san" being somewhat like "Ms" or "Mrs" and the "o" adding honour to something considered important. Other examples of the "o" prefix include "o-mizu"
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This isn't easy to translate properly, but the nuances are very possible in other languages, too. People using titles instead of names for example is one way to convey that, another way is the tone in which it is said.
The thing is that most times, especially when it comes to "kids" anime, the effort just isn't there. In my experience, more often than not the nuances are not lost in translation because it's not possible to do it, it's usually far more likely that whoever made the translation didn't know, or,
I'd believe it (Score:4, Interesting)
I've translated stories from Farsi to English and doing good translation is no picnic. Note that I didn't say my translations were good, but at times I've struggled with how to translate something in a meaningful way into English, sometimes resorting to footnotes to give a more descriptive narration of the author's intent, something you can't do in subtitles. So I cringe when I come across watching a foreign movie with bad subtitles and will either look for better subtitles, or put the movie off for later watching if I can't find a suitable subtitle, because subtitles can make or break a viewing experience.
And in regard to "72% of Netflix's American viewers said they prefer dubs when watching Spanish hit Money Heist," I'd completely believe that. Among friends, or in a movie club I once belonged to, nobody wanted to watch something with subtitles, and because of that they literally cut themselves off a world of entertainment. I can see why people who may not be interested in subtitles might be interested in dubbed version, because it's at least better than nothing. But for those of us who don't have an aversion to subtitles, we always rather have subtitles than dubs. Part of watching something in a foreign language is KNOWING at all times that you're watching something that's not from your culture. Watching Money Heist dubbed would have ruined it for me.
Significant problems with subtitling.. (Score:2)
If you build a subtitling system, you have only two alternatives:
1) either be hired by the hollywood studios
2) or subtitle pirated movies
Basically this economics makes it impossible to create subtitling system, because you can never be sure if hollywood studios are interested in your work. If studios fail to nurture the subtitling industry, the technology ends up being used in the pirate area.
This is all lose-lose proposition for technology vendors. Basically it's not worth the time to creat
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Oh, no. A business venture might carry risk! Say it isn't so!
If your product is good and lowers costs, it will sell. If not, then it won't.
It's not like there isn't a need for good tools to produce open/closed captions. Fortune awaits anyone with the skills and the courage to make it happen.
things missed in subtitles (Score:3)
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Expletives are often hard to translate because they have an implied meaning that is often very divergent from what is actually said. When you tell someone to go to hell, you usually don't expect him to know the way and actually starts descending into the pits of hell.
It's also safe to assume that "fuck you" is usually not an invitation to intercourse.
What about deep fake the lips to match dubs? (Score:2)
I'm sure there would be more to it, but if we can shift faces to look more like someone else couldn't we also cover up mouth movements or stretch them out to match a different language track?
Yes, having a plan ahead of time might work best (green screen that area or something). But I know there was talk about scanning/recording actors and then rendering the movie without them moving a muscle again. Didn't seem to happen, but time should only make this more possible.
Localization is not direct translation (Score:2)
The art of the samples is dying. Maybe the author should have used a car metaphor.
Iâ(TM)ve not seen squid game, so I canâ(TM)t speak to the quality of the English subs in general.
However the example given assumes that the English reader has the context that âoeolder brotherâ is a sign of endearment and familiarity between 2 men of differing ages.
However changing from a more formal Mr. Something to a persons name is a sign of familiarity in English. Could it have been better, possibly, ma
Dubbing isn't new (Score:2)
In China, essentially all movies are dubbed into Chinese: Sometimes, one can unplug one speaker and hear the original audio.
The USA has a similar fascination with dubbing: Australian movies had to be dubbed into American.
Some movies are designed with dubbing in mind: With the director avoiding close-ups and extreme close-ups for long conversations.
Dubbing? (Score:3)
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It doesn't, but the translations for dubbing are different than the translations for subbing, because the speech in dubs has to take roughly as long to say as the original.
Script for dubbing is... subtitling? (Score:2)
How does dubbing fix anything? (Score:2)
Translating is hard full stop (Score:2)
Not only do you have to deal with idiomatic expressions that may have either no equivalent or one that is wildly different (from an objective viewpoint), but there is also the fact that even some literal statements can have a much stronger/weaker connotation in the target language vs the source language.
You throw in a rushed deadline and of course mistakes will be made, including comically terrible ones.
That's why there is an Italian expression "Traduttore, traditore", which is usually translated as "The tr
Dubbing sucks (Score:2)
The problem with dubbing is that the dubbing actors are not as good actors as the actual actors. You might not understand the language, but you certainly understand the intonation.
Furthermore, who says the dialog they actually say is any more true to the original than the subtitles?
What we need is one language in one stereo channel, and the other in the other, and learn to process both at once. Improve NI, Natural Intelligence!
Preference for either is cultural (Score:2)
Amusing subtitle errors (Score:2)
There are amusing errors in subtitling, and some deliberate inconsistencies.
Way back in the late 1960s I watched Un homme et une femme [wikipedia.org] in French with English subtitles. At one point, the hero is driving a night session of the Grand Prix auto race. His navigator warns, "Épingle de cheveux droite," and he turns sharply right, but the subtitle says "Hairpin turn left." Similarly, French spoken "gauche" becomes "right" in the English subtitle. My Francophonic brain cells were fine, but the English readin
Repeated translation (Score:2)
In the American screenings of Le Roi de coeur [wikipedia.org], which I watched several New Years' at the Biograph theater in Washington DC, double feature with A Thousand Clowns, the protagonist is an English Army Signaller in France as the Germans are retreating toward the end of The Great War (to end war, but now referred to as "World War I"). He mostly speaks French, but at one point he sends a written message by carrier pigeon to his army superiors. The written message shows on the screen in English. The original mov
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+100
The additional problem with subtitles is you are so busy reading the text, you loose context of the visuals of the scene. You miss tons of subtle things that may be happening with the framing, or nuances of character behavior, because you focus is in reading the text.
Re: Don't subtitle, Dub! (Score:2)
One small mistake does not make someone illiterate.
One small comment can make you look like a right dick, though.
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The display of subtitles is a function of the device you're watching on. Font size, color, etc. are all controlled by the application or hardware doing the rendering. The subtitles themselves are just text and timings in the media stream/container.
Re:Don't subtitle, Dub! (Score:5, Insightful)
I strongly prefer subtitles to dubbing for a lot of reasons. In fact, I can't stand to watch dubbed movies. Reading them happens at a subconscious level after a while, to the point that it almost feels like I'm understanding the foreign language.
The primary issue with dubbing is that the voice is a huge component of the acting performance, but that voice needs to sync with the actor's physical movements. A dubbed performance never gets it perfect, resulting in an "uncanny valley" problem where I can never quite believe that the actor I'm seeing is the one speaking.
A secondary issue is that the dub actors are almost never as high quality as the original actor. You can end up with Oscar-quality performances being read by no-talent C-listers. Or just as bad, the dub actors can be horribly miscast with a character who should have a deep baritone being read by a tenor.
A tertiary issue is that translation may have to be stilted to work within a dubbing framework. There may be no good translation that can fit within the time before the next actor has to speak. A subtitle can be as long or as short as it needs to be to convey the proper translation.
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It sucks for people with normal vision as well. I swear that people go out of their way to make open captions illegible.
Another annoyance is closed captions overlapping open captions, particularly when they don't match. An otherwise legible open caption is useless when the CC just says *Foreign Language* and blocks the translation! You've been able to position closed captions anywhere on the screen for as long as we've had them. Even if some absurd policy keeps you from copying over the translation, at
Re:Don't subtitle, Dub! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's 2022, surely we can manage to allow the user to change the font size...
Oh wait, we can. You just have to pirate the subtitles and use Kodi instead of the Netflix app. As usual the pirate version is better quality.
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And the sub is often even closer to the original, because the pirate subber doesn't have to worry about using a "nasty" word that we can't have on our "wholesome" product.
That the product is Hellsing and about zombies and Nazis doesn't matter. It's a cartoon, so it has to be kiddy compatible.
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You really need to have both dubbing and subtitles available. If nothing else, you need to have some kind of written titles for deaf and hard of hearing people, the same way you need dubbing for people who have trouble reading the subtitles.
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I've looked through all menus again (literally upon opening your reply), and I can't see any option to adjust the subtitles.
I've contacted support asking where I find these settings, because there not present, and not hidden under any kind of advanced option, I've been through every visible option. This is a Roku TV, so I don't know, maybe it's a bug, glitch or something else.
If I find them, or TCL tells me where I find them, then I'll keep this updated, be
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Yes, dub quality is very mixed bag.
For animated content with vague mouth movements, there's potential for a fantastic dub, matching the 'lip flaps', limited only by the commitment to the dub by the production company. Nowadays such dubs tend to be better than they used to be. They used to 100% barely care and just grab whatever low cost voice work they could get and as a result have really bad performances.
For live action, it's just not possible to have a dub match the mouths and it can be distracting. I
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I remember, back in the day, when double-CD size DivX movies were painstakingly downloaded for days off FTP, I ended up getting "The Twins" (Arnie + De Vito) from a buddy of mine. The first CD was as expected, the second CD was dubbed in Hungarian. Arnold saying "igen" with a much different voice (it was a deep voice but nowhere near what Arnie actually sounds) was enough for me to stop watching immediately.
Now, about subtitles. I have very mild symptoms of auditory neuropathy. When watching movies, scenes
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A subtitle can be as long or as short as it needs to be to convey the proper translation.
But if it takes you longer to read a lengthy translation than the time between dialogue you end up right back to the problem you mentioned with fitting the dubbing into the allotted time.
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That's what pause is for. (As long as pause doesn't put up some stupid display covering the captions, which is depressingly common these days...)
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Most people can read much more quickly than they can speak the same words. There's a decent bit of wiggle room for a long translation.
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Completely agree with this. With dubbing half of the actor's performance is being hidden from you. Voice and intonation are a critical part of acting.
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You don't represent the majority, sorry. The industry doesn't revolve around you.
PS: For every person like you there's a deaf person for whom subtitles are a godsend.
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Re:Don't subtitle, Dub! (Score:5, Insightful)
Shorter you: "Your disability doesn't matter, only mine does, no reason for it to work for everybody."
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"Have them available as an option, but don't rely on them to carry the production, because subtitles don't work well, and they're annoying. Can anyone honestly say they prefer to see them in use".
Just don't rely on them as a single source of clarity, because they aren't.
Lazy Americans (Score:2)
The problem might be that Americans, like French, don't usually grow watching content from other cultures. By the time they are adults and might try to enjoy something new, laziness kicks in. If you'd have been watching subtitled movies since you were 7, like the rest of the world, you wo
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My point was to include both, because subtitles are a joke for people like me, where I have to expend enough mental focus to
Re:Lazy Americans (Score:4, Informative)
My god. I find it hard to believe a slashdotter can't listen, watch and read simultaneously.
You must be new here. I'm amazed most of them can read at all.
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Subtitling might be dying, I'm not sure, but it's annoying to read subtitles at best, and impossible at worst. There are plenty of shows where it's visually impossible for a hard sighted person to read the subtitles, because they place white on white, or white on grey, and never have contrast to make it possible. On top of that, the text is usually small, not spaced well enough, and just hard to read in the best of cases.
Those are more of problems with the settings of your device/service. For example turning on outline will put a black border on white letters so that they will appear on white backgrounds. Also make the subtitles larger if you want.
Have them available as an option, but don't rely on them to carry the production, because subtitles don't work well, and they're annoying. Can anyone honestly say they prefer to see them in use?
A lot of content no longer has burned in subtitles where they part of the image and cannot be removed. They may be turned on by default for foreign films however. For example, I could turn on Spanish subtitles for Squid Game but it defaults to English for my region. I use subtitle
Re:Don't subtitle, Dub! (Score:4, Informative)
Those are more of problems with the settings of your device/service. For example turning on outline will put a black border on white letters so that they will appear on white backgrounds. Also make the subtitles larger if you want.
Well, yes, we're talking about Netflix subtitles. They're done by Netflix and have no settings. You get whatever Netflix does with them, which is generally just white text at the bottom of the screen, and that's it.
Good subtitles are hard but also require good software, which pretty much universally isn't used. You get whatever the software publisher decided on, and if you don't like it - oh well! That's DRM for you!
The silly thing is that the old CC system used on old NTSC TVs was more capable than modern captions. It supported multiple colors and positioning the text around the screen. Modern systems are just text, at a given time, rendered however the video player decides.
Open source, of course, has created software [nikse.dk] and a format called "Advanced Sub Station Alpha" that's far more capable [nikse.dk], but it doesn't matter. The subs companies produce and use are pretty much universally files that are just long lists of "at timestamp until timestamp, show this text." And the video players only support rendering that text at the bottom of the video in white text in a font of their choosing.
Since you can only (legally) watch Netflix in their player, you get white text centered at the bottom of the screen, which is all they support.
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Well, yes, we're talking about Netflix subtitles. They're done by Netflix and have no settings. You get whatever Netflix does with them, which is generally just white text at the bottom of the screen, and that's it.
Well that's a lie. [netflix.com]
Good subtitles are hard but also require good software, which pretty much universally isn't used. You get whatever the software publisher decided on, and if you don't like it - oh well! That's DRM for you!
That is not the meaning of the word DRM.
The silly thing is that the old CC system used on old NTSC TVs was more capable than modern captions. It supported multiple colors and positioning the text around the screen. Modern systems are just text, at a given time, rendered however the video player decides.
Also a lie [wikipedia.org]"ATSC broadcasts instead use the EIA-708 caption protocol to encapsulate both the EIA-608 caption pairs as well as add a native EIA-708 stream". That's like saying Unicode is worse than ASCII when the Unicode includes ASCII.
Since you can only (legally) watch Netflix in their player, you get white text centered at the bottom of the screen, which is all they support.
Again false. Here I am watching Netflix in a browser with yellow text [netflix.com] like a hippie.
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Hell no. Dubbing is horrible. I get it reading isn't for everyone, and some people consume video content such that they try and engage as few braincells as possible, but much of the emotion of acting is lost in a dub. You're literally getting an actor pretending to be an actor without the context of the second actor pretending to be the character in the film. Great examples of this: Arnold Schwarzenegger was not allowed to dub his own character in German because they didn't like the sound of his voice. Or H
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much of the emotion of acting is lost in a dub.
Plus: You often get the same voice actors used in many different movies so two different actors can end up with the same voice.
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Supposedly the reason the French love Jerry Lewis is that his customary dubber is very good.
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Me! I prefer subtitles for anything not originally in English.
Re: Don't subtitle, Dub! (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't watch dubbs. Grew up with subs. That's the case in all smaller European countries. That's why people like us speak English better and with less pronounced accent compared to say the French, the Germans, the Italians...
I adored watching recordings of Shakespeare plays while growing behind the wall. No one would think to dub actors of such class.
How do you enjoy a Kurosawa movie that is dubbed? Or a Cinese one? The dissonance between the body language and speech would be intolerable!
And lastly, consider this. The dubbing, or shall we say dumbing cuts both ways.
Do you want to see the original SW trilogy dubbed in French? I have. Darth Vader speaking French! I survived the experience, barely, only because we played the Star Wars drinking game. Brain shut down half way A New Hope.
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As someone from a country where pretty much every movie is dubbed, I can tell you that whether I agree with you depends heavily on who does the dub. Because it can literally range from improving the original show to absolutely botching it.
And in case of Japanese Anime, it's usually the latter because, hey, it's just for kids anyway, right, so who gives a fuck? Now add that this stereotype is still firmly lodged in the heads of studio execs, i.e. "it's cartoon, so it must be for little kids" and you can see
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To be frank, I find dubbed movies a travesty. I want to hear the original voices.
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