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[Opsa]

I've seen a few comedians whose act includes out-of-synch American-English "dubbing" of Hong-Kong-style martial arts films. The facial expressions and gestures are correct for the film, but the fake dubbing never matches the length of the original speech, and often they are 'speaking' when the mouth is closed, or making the wrong shapes for the sounds. I always enjoy seeing this done well.    

I enjoy that, as well.

I tend to prefer subtitles, but the first time I ever saw Japanese Sci Fi I saw it with dubs, and the effect was more comical than intended and since I am a goofball and love a good larf I rather like them that way.

The same goes with Fellini films. The English translations were hilarious. Plus, Fellini is so visually oriented I hate to miss a shot, so I prefer the subtitled versions of his films.

Thinking more about it, the film "Amelie" is one of my faves, and it is very visual, yet the subtitles did not seem to interfere with the visuals.

[Roland Deschain]

Roland's been doing lots of posting which means there are lots of things to read............ great stuff !!

Thread drift, thread drift, over the bounding waves...

I much prefer subtitles to dubs, but I do have to admit i've seen a few very good dubs over the years, although they are terribly few and far between. I feel a dubbed movie loses something in the emotion and inflection of what's being said. When you read subtitles, you hear that emotion as it was meant to be, whereas an actor who may not have seen the film will miss it completely, or if they're lazy and/or bad at it, just not include it.

Italian horror films dubbed into English, including some from Dario Argento and his contemporaries, are notorious for what are probably unintentionally humorous dubs, which just adds to the films in my opinion, but when watching most other films, it doesn't work.

I don't speak any other language than English, at least not in any convincing way, so cannot watch a film in its original language without subtitles, but as Griffin points out above, I too have noticed where the subtitles don't appear to convey exactly what's being said. One example was in a Danish TV series I watched, where the subtitles were the work of a Danish guy who'd written them. For the most part they were good, but there were moments where, because of words I came to recognise and associate to their English meaning, I would hear the Danish word, but not see its English counterpart appear on the screen.

Sometimes subtitles are obviously put through the blender known as auto-translation tools, with absolutely no thought given to context or quality control. My last job involved liaising with localisation testers on software, and I can assure you it makes a world of difference when you have a decent translator on board.

[Griffin NoName]

Agree. I always listen to the original as I read subtitles, that way I get the emotional content. Dubbing destroys that however good iit is, as it is "over the top", tacked on, not original. emotions and humour in other languages are always subtly different so there will always be those that cannot be coveyed in dubbing too.

[Swatopluk]

There are a few very rare cases where a dubbing voice seems to be more fitting than the original.
I think it is quite common to imagine a face to a voice one only hears (think radio) or to see the picture of a person and to think about how that person's voice sounds. Surprisingly often I find that my mental image does not fit the reality there at all. It's even worse with singing voices. I have often found that speaking and singing voice can be very different, esp. with women, e.g.  deep/low when talking and high soprano when singing.