I Can't Read While I'm Also Trying to See Things!

[Castle]

I know the anime folks luve them thar subbies but I only speak and understand English. And yes, subtitles are distracting. First thing I do when starting a new game (after inverting the x-axis, yes i'm one of those weird gamers ) is disable the subtitles. I can understand the dialog just fine. I only have to hear it.

And I will be hard pressed to watch anything if it is subbed or dubbed.

 

[misskitten]

I absolute hate dubbing, I can understand the need for it when it's movies made for children who haven't learned to read properly yet (but I personally watched movies and shows in English when I was just two years old - didn't understand what anyone was saying, yet, but didn't stop me from enjoying it), and I can tolerate to a degree dubbing of animated movies and shows.

But for everything else, I just can't stand dubbing. It looks, sounds and feels artificial to me - I end up focusing on how horrible the voice acting or how the words are completely out of sync with the movement of the lips, etc, rather than relax and just try to enjoy the show/movie. It might have to do with Norwegian voice-acting mostly being horrible - just a select few times have I watched an animated movie in Norwegian and actually enjoyed the voice acting - and those times they have made sure to hire a cast with a large number of different dialects (and made sure the actors were decent voice-actors).

I think it's important for us to be exposed to languages, when I was little I watched things in Swedish, Danish, English and French. It helped me have less problems understanding Swedes and Danes when they talk to me, gave me early exposure for English and French, which I later learned in school (can't say I'm that good with French, but then again I only had minor exposure to the language and the classes weren't really geared towards actually speaking and understanding the language - too much spelling/grammar focus).

My own nieces now watch everything in Norwegian and I find it such a shame, such a horrible development. First of all there are no real reasons to dub Swedish and Danish if you're a Norwegian. The languages are similar and it's simply culture-enhancing to have that exposure.

I can understand if a person has geniune problems following subtitles, but for the rest of us, I feel it's just people being lazy. You get a better and more genuine experience watching a movie or show in its intended language. Exposure to different languages and culture is a good thing.

 

[Vanessa28]

Well I'm dutch and do understand english very good and I also understand german pretty well. Over here only foreign movies have subtitles. I persoanlly don;t think they are distracting my attention from the movie. Not even in the slightest bit. I usually watch Dr Who on the BBC because over here they broadcast one season when the next season already starts. So I like to be up to date and therefore I turn on the BBC. I can follow it pretty well and most of the times I know what's been said. BUT sometimes there is many technical talk and especially the 10th Doctor made it a habit to talk either very fast or mumble. I understand him yes but it's not always easy to follow. So I ordered the boxes but with english subtitles. I watched some episodes I couldn't understand fully again but now with subtitles.

So yeah I think subtitles are a good thing in my opinion and not distracting at all. I can see what's going on and read the same thing. But I prefer to read in english rather than dutch. Because sometimes the translation is not completely okay