With Parasite’s Oscar wins including Best Picture there has been increased focus on the debate between subtitling and dubbing. (Parasite was subtitled.)
Subtitling preserves the original dialog track and vocal performances of the cast by presenting the dialog, often not in a verbatim form, as text usually along the bottom of the screen. Night Watch, a 2004 Russian urban fantasy film presented its subtitles in sometimes floating and dissolving text to convey the seductive nature of a character’s voice.
Dubbing removes the original dialog track from the audio and replaces it with a spoken language track for the intended audience, in the United States that is usually English. Often the original actors are not employed in this replacement but rather specialized voice actors provide the new dialog. In rare cases dubbing may be used to replace an actor’s dialog where the film is not being translated into a new language. In Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes the director replaced all of Andie MacDowell’s dialog with Glenn Close because he was unhappy with the quality of her voice while in Flash Gordon, due to conflicts with the producer Dino De Laurentiis, Sam J. Jones’s voice, who played Flash, was replaced entirely in post-production. These examples are the exception and not the rule as dubbing is most prominently used for translation.
Some cinephiles consider subtitling a purer form of the film experience, preferring to hear the original performance while many people, usually more casual film viewers, like the ease of dubbing.
I prefer subtitling myself but I would caution people to refrain from snobbery towards those who enjoy their films dubbed. There are a variety of reason why dubbing may work better for some people. A key aspect of enjoyable film watching is the suspension of disbelief, when the reality of the story unfolding on the screen if fully accepted the movie becomes like a waking dream for the viewer. There are people for whom the act of breaking their reverie with the image to read the text shatters that delicate illusion keeping the story and the characters at an emotional distance. There are people who are competent readers but not quick ones and the pace of subtitled dialog can be stressful again shattering the suspension of disbelief.
Dubbing also has troubling issues. Often the voice of the dubbed actor doesn’t match with the body of the on-screen talent. In the 1976 movie MidwayJapanese star Toshiro Mifune’s voice was replaced by Paul Frees, a good actor with lots of good performances to his credit but his amazing baritones voice was an ill fit for Mifune. A second issue with dubbing the trouble synchronizing the dialog to the actor’s lips. When the languages are closely related, such as German and English in Das Boot, where most of the onscreen actors performed their own English language dub the mismatch can be minimized but for languages widely separated across the globe, such as Japanese and English, the lack of synchronization can produce an unintended comical effect.
There is no perfect or ‘right’ answer and I say watch films in the manner that makes the experience most pleasurable to you and don’t worry or judge others for their differences.
