No Right Answer: Subbing Vs. Dubbing

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Petromir

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Apr 10, 2010
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Right.

Dubs can work on animated content, especially if any efforts made to adapt the picture to fit the rhythms of the language being dubbed. Far to many dubs have blatant issues with connection to the screen, commonly having characters voices continue for up to and sometimes over a second after the mouth has stopped moving.

Knocking an english speaker out of synch vocals to picture by even a few frames is incredibly distracting, not having lip movements that even vaguely relate is just dreadful. This is why masked (or otherwise lip/mouthless) characters come across better in dubs

Intonation and emphasis change so much that dubs rarely get them right. I'll get that far better from an average sub and the original audio.

I recently took part in a film contest. The film is in english but as one of our actors had a noticeable French accent, we wrote her character so when she get angry she drops into French. We did neither dubbing or subbing, as the scenes work almost as well with just the French even if you don't understand the words the meaning is clear enough. Dubbing her, even by her (her english was great, the rest of the film was testament to that), would defiantly have ruined the scene, as the lack of the language switch would lessen the emotion.

Many people if not most have the ability to get a fair amount of understanding from just the tone, rhythm etc of someones voice (add in body language for greater understanding), only exceptional dubs nail that feel, and those are like unicorn farts.
 

DiMono

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Mar 18, 2010
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First off, shoutout to Red vs Blue on the shelf

I prefer subtitles. I have yet to watch any dubbed movie (other than Kung Pow) where the actors doing the redubbing were able to actually capture the tone and meaning of what's being said. It's always basically a flat reading of lines, and that strips the movie of all character it might have had.
 

Something Amyss

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Dec 3, 2008
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I think the kind of movie is also important. Anime is fine with me because so often the dialogue and action don't so much happen at the same time. Fifteen frames of action and then a speech. Not all movies and show do this, though.
 

happyninja42

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May 13, 2010
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I'm a mix for both really. It depends on the particular work. For example, Cowboy Bebop. I was first exposed to this with the dubbed, and I can't see myself watching it subbed, because the voices have become part of those characters to me.

But then, with Attack on Titan, I prefer the subbed, because the voices seem to fit better. The english voice actors just sounded...wrong.

As for conveying emphasis in dubbed better than subbed, it's not that hard to hear the emphasis in the original lines, and then just translate that over to the text at the bottom. I mean if the character is saying something with anger, or seduction, or manic humor, it's pretty obvious in the voices, and the words matching up to it reflect that.

So yeah, it's a mix, depending on the work itself.