The Advantages of Dubbing Over Subtitling

• Foreign movies have to choose between subtitles or dubbing. film clapper 3d open image by Nicemonkey from Fotolia.com

  Whether to watch foreign movies subtitled or dubbed has been a debate for years. Since the popular American obsession with Japanese anime, the debate has become even more intense. This is partly because anime has less lip movement and so avoids the cognitive dissonance common to old Godzilla and kung-fu movies when the actor's lip movements did not match the sounds -- one of the main complaints about dubbing.

Reading Problems

• Some of the main arguments in support of dubbing are really complaints involved in reading subtitles. All of us can listen faster than we can read, so in fast-paced or dialog-heavy films, the words are not on the screen long enough for the normal person to read. Reading is also a problem for children too young to read, or older movie goers who only wear glasses to read.

Vision Problems

• The visual impact of a scene can be destroyed by subtitles. This is a constant complaint of anime fans because the beauty of the drawings are a large part of the enjoyment of anime. In some theaters, patrons can be too far away to read the subtitles or have the subtitles obscured by the heads of those in the front rows. These problems are especially acute in scenes where the background is nearly the same color as the subtitles and the subtitles get washed out.

Sensory Integration

• We are used to looking at people while listening to them talk -- it is natural and we practice it every day. Reading words as we are watching an actor speak is unnatural and exhausting. Dubbing a movie can actually improve it -- sometimes the dubbing actors are better at their craft than the actors you are watching. Dubbing actors can also put in inflections that match the movements of the actors, whereas the written word is more static -- you may not read a word when the actor speaks it. With subtitled movies, you are constantly taking your eyes off the actors (and background) to read the subtitles -- thus more sensory miss-match.

Conflicting Translations

• With dubbing, you are getting one story line, but with subtitles you are getting two story lines -- one written and one spoken. Experienced foreign movie fans (who do not understand the spoken language) can get used to it, but people who understand both languages are constantly comparing the two story lines. When you go to a foreign move that is subtitled where you do not understand the language, you will be be surprised with the sudden laughter at seemingly random places when some people in the audience laugh at inept translations. This never happens with dubbed movies.