I'll start this off by saying that I'm more of a "subtitles" guy rather than dubs. Not that I am againt dubs, but I sure as hell won't watch any if there's an original version to be seen/heard with (decent) subtitles. I honestly don't remember when's the last time I've seen a movie dubbed in another language.
With that being said, I'll try to counter-argue/discuss some of your points in a friendly fashion :)
If you are not from Russia, chances are you don't speak (or understand) Russian.
And chances are you are not going to learn Russian unless you have a good reason to, such as you've fallen in love with a Russian person or you're going to work on the ISS. But you're not going to learn Russian just so that you can appreciate Tarkovsky's films better. This is not laziness of course, it is simply being reasonable.
That is true, and when it comes to Tarkovsky's movies I've seen it mentioned dozens of times that no translation can do it justice, due to all the "poetry" of the russian language and the words used (not to mention all the poems by Tarkovsky's father, which appear in almost all of his movies).
However, if you're the type of person to be open to all kinds of movies in every kind of language, you will, over time, undeniably come to learn and recognize some words, sentences, manners of speech, etc. I don't know that much Russian, but Tarkovsky's movies did help a bit.
For example, I also read mangas and occasionally watch animes (always subbed), and with just that I've come to realize I now have a somewhat vast vocabulary in the japanese language.
Can I write japanese? Heck no. Can I actually speak full sentences? Eh, maybe a few. Does my japanese sound right? A bit, perhaps, but at least I know the meaning to hundreds of words and could/can almost watch japanese things without subtitles. As a matter of fact, at times I can tell when the subs are wrong from what I hear.
To me, it's one of the "pros" in watching things in their original language. You learn stuff, which is always good.
1. Listening and reading are not the same thing! When watching a film, your eyes are for the visuals and your ears are for the audio parts including the dialogue. Making your eyes work harder to do one of the tasks your ears should be doing but can't is not getting the authentic experience. Dragging yourself by your arms when your legs are broken is not the same experience as walking.
I get that, however, the more a person is into dubs the harder it will become for them to read subtitles. Let's face it, no sane human being would just settle with watching dubbed movies forever, there would come a time where they'd need to watch something subbed.
I'm so used to reading subtitles that sometimes I even have the time to re-read them. It's like an acquired thing, with time it just becomes automatic, sometimes I just need to stare at a single focal point to get the whole sentence as opposed to reading a word after another.
But there's also the following issue, where I think you kinda contradict yourself:
"When watching a film, your eyes are for the visuals and your ears are for the audio parts
including the dialogue."
Including the dialogue, which should be in its original, native audio/language. If you decide to dub something, you're not just "making it easier" for some to watch the film, but you're erasing the whole language and replacing it with something else.
You are replacing the voices of the actors that you are watching, with those of other people. And this is one of my biggest issues with dubs; how the hell can someone immerse themselves in a story when the words that you're hearing don't match at all the lips of the characters...? There goes your authentic experience out the window.
2. Subtleties in dialogue may be lost in a bad dub, but may be preserved in a good one. They are less likely to be preserved in subtitles, because even if you can hear the actor's voice, you don't know where his emphasis is if you don't know the language. Consider a line such as, "I don't love you." In a language that may have completely different syntax, how can you tell if the speaker is emphasising the I, the Don't, the Love or the You?
My response to this kinda follows what I said previously/above;
In all honesty (although my opinion could be biased), I believe you're more likely to get the "emphasis" if you're
watching the actor and hearing his own voice, as opposed to watching someone and hearing someone else.
I mean, we're talking about movies here. Actors prepare months, sometimes years to get into character, and that shows. You could never, ever replicate that through dubs, no matter how accurate they are, because whoever is dubbing didn't go through the same thing that the actual actors did. They're just translating and trying to make it match as best as they can, and that couldn't possibly ever compete with the real, raw deal.
Now, I say this fully knowing that nowadays all the films are dubbed (meaning that the audio is re-recorded in studios), but my point remains the same.
I'm not saying that dubs are bad. In fact, some are very good, like the french (then again one of the main reasons why french people, for the most part, suck at speaking english is because all of their movies are dubbed and thus they don't really get to experience it as much). The germans, for example, have to dub the movies as well because they have words that would fill your entire TV screen, which would make it impossible to sub. I get that.
But the way I see it, with dubs, you're just removing yourself even further from the real thing. You're seeing something, but hearing a whole different thing. If you only want to get the gist of the story, that's fine, otherwise you'd be better off watching/waiting for the inevitable remakes.
Like you said, the audio matters. Language
matters, not only can it be essential to some of the stories, it can also be crucial for a character's portrayal.
3. People who want to listen to dialogue in a language they understand are not necessarily being lazy. You don't know what they're doing when they're not watching films - maybe they've just done a very long shift in a factory or a surgery and now they just want to watch a film that someone recommended. Maybe they're eating at the same time, and so they can't concentrate on food, visuals and subtitles. [Hey, of course I realise they should be concentrating on every single frame, and if that means quitting their job so they have time to do this, so be it. But let's pretend for a moment that films aren't just for people who did film studies at college.]
Sure, I get that, but I think that's different. From what you're saying, it seems like you're talking about movies where you can just "shut down" your brain and enjoy. Like, for example, Transformers (lol).
There's all sorts of movies, and when I recommend movies I always say (depending on the movie):
- you have to be alone and you can't pause the movie;
- it's a very long movie, almost 3h long, so make sure you're ready to invest that time;
- dude avoid any spoilers just watch it;
- this one is more of a slow-burn but it pays off;
Etc. etc. It depends, but I really don't think it's just as simple as you said. If they can't commit to a certain film maybe they should watch something else instead if they're not in the right mood. Watching a dub, the way I see it, would be like watching a different - but bad - version of the same movie... which kinda defeats the purpose. Unless it's a bad, campy movie I guess, in which case nothing's lost, I guess (except time).
4. Not everybody can read. And do you know what? That doesn't make them stupid. Other people can read, but not fast enough. Some people have dyslexia.
Fair enough, but I'm certain there are other alternatives. Again, it's all variable, but if you're someone who likes movies and actually enjoy the experience you'll find dubs in general hard to watch, because it just doesn't quite work the same way, but if you just want to understand it when there's no other solution, go for it.
5. Subtitles are often summaries of what the actor said, not word for word translations. Again, how is a summary the authentic experience? And think about why they are abridged - because they distract the audience from the elements that are meant to be visual.
If a movie is meant to be purely visual, then there would be no need for dialogues in the first place. There's a movie called The Tribe, 2h long, with no subtitles, spoken only in sign language, which only deaf people can "understand". I've yet to watch that one, but the premise seems original.
And yet, there are some countries that needlessly dub such movies. Actually, I just remembered another thing that I loathe; movie dubs that also keep the original audio, which means that you're hearing two persons speaking at once, in different languages. What good does that do?
Of course it all depends on what movie we're talking about, but in general an actor is more than just flesh and bones, and you get a lot of emotion through a lot of things, but also through voice. I think it's something that you always have to keep, otherwise it wouldn't be the same thing. That's as real and close to the actual experience that you can get, to see it/hear it as it was made and intended to be experienced.
I know this might be a bit off-topic, but I'll point out the animes once more: the voice-actors excel at what they do, the work and emotion they put out is outstanding. And you know what happens when the americans dub it? The americans dubs remove
a lot of the other audio (like background noise, sound effects, etc.), all in favor of the dub, and you lose a lot in the process. Not just that, but in some cases the dub casts aside a big chunk of the actual story and replace it with english puns and other things related to, say, american things. This might be one of those cases where the dubs are "bad" like you said, but I'm afraid 90% of them are.
It's not just that, too. When you dub something, you're not effectively throwing away the actor's portrayal, you're effectively messing with the audio/sound mixing that's part of the post-production, which only serves to mess up even more the movie as a whole.
If people can read, I don't see why they wouldn't make such a small effort. Like, I get what you mean, I really do, but I don't see how anyone can't notice the horrid lip-sync and just be ok with it without being put off for the rest of the movie, and that's just one issue among many. I mean, even I notice it when it's korean movies dubbed in chinese for example, you can tell right away that something's not clicking.
A few months back I saw something that left me speechless. It was a documentary on the anniversary of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings, where they interviewed some Japanese survivors. And you know what they did? They dubbed the whole thing.
People, men and women who weren't even born at the time, were speaking over these survivors with words as if they were their own. No emotion, no experience, no nothing at all. I just wanted to hear the survivors's voices, their ACTUAL voices, but instead got a dub. It was horrendous, and in very bad taste to do something like that. Who the hell thought that something like that would be a good idea?
If I want to hear about their stories, I want to hear it from the actual people, not from some douchebag that's just reading it from a script in hopes of making some bucks and who has no idea what kind of things those persons went through. It's just basic, that's how I see it.
So yeah, I think my stance on this is pretty obvious. I do recognize that some dubbing has some quality to it, but I'll always watch movies with their original settings. I, for one, love the sound of other languages, and believe that's also what makes some foreign movies even greater, like Tarkovsky's work, Refn's Pusher trilogy (in Danish), among others. The sound, the characters, the voices, it all forms a body and you just can't hack it away, replace it with different parts and pretend it still has the same effect in the end :/.
Took me a while to write this up, probably forgot a couple arguments but oh well, cheers.
Fine, fine, I'll leave! But first I'm going to bother these peanuts! Hmm? Yes? Hmm? HMM?
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paulbeardsley
8 years ago
Wow. I expected no reply, or a foaming-at-the-mouth closed-minded reply. Instead I received a well-thought-out, interesting, reasonably persuasive and, above all, polite reply. Thank you so much, Giraffe_Monster!
I thought your most interesting point was that you start to pick up the language if you persevere, and this more than anything else encourages me to favour subs over dubs when I'm watching on my own (my wife hates subs). Incidentally, as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language, I'm very aware that students generally understand language (reading or listening) much quicker than they can produce (speaking or writing). So it's not surprising that your understood Japanese vocab is much more impressive than your range of spoken Japanese sentences - although you're still far ahead of what I can do!
(As a somewhat lowbrow aside, 20 years ago I worked with a group of people who were learning Klingon. Now I love science fiction, and I generally take an "each to his own" policy on what other people do for fun as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else, but I do think learning Klingon is among the worst things anyone can do with their time. The language is artificial in the pejorative sense (as opposed to, say, Esperanto, which is artificial in the at-least-trying-to-do-something-helpful sense). Anyway, a few weeks later my wife and I were watching one of the Star Trek films, and I suddenly said, "Oh God! I just understood what that Klingon said before I read the subtitle!")
Some of your other points are pretty much in accordance of my own. Yes, there are very bad dubs (although I hadn't thought about the ones that drown out or overwrite non-dialogue sound - that really takes the biscuit). The lack of lip-synch has never bothered me, though. If, from an early age, I've come in partway through a film, I've sometimes thought, "Why don't the spoken words match the movement of his mouth? Oh, it must be dubbed." Then I've carried on watching (or not) depending on how interesting it looked.
In the part where you think I contradict myself, I should point out that there are two parts to listening to dialogue - listening for the sound of the actor's voice, and listening for meaning. If you don't know the language, it's one or the other. Sometimes both the visuals and the dialogue are important - a film doesn't have to be purely visual - but the meaning is sometimes more important than the tone of voice, and so you don't want subtitles to distract from the visuals.
There are, of course, very bad subs. We've already discussed heavily abridged ones. There are white subs which appear against a white background. There are the often spoofed ones (mainly Japanese) in which the individual words were probably translated literally but which utterly fail to convey the spirit of the original line of dialogue - often to unintentionally hilarious effect. Indeed, respect for Japanese culture may have diminished slightly as a result.
In the specific case of Solaris, I think I watched the film three times with subtitles, having read the novel twice. (I've since listened to a new unabridged translation of the novel in audio form - that's another discussion, btw, whether you get the full experience from an audiobook!) I loved the film, obviously, or I wouldn't keep watching it. But there were one or two bits I didn't quite get. Then I watched it a fourth time, this time the (mostly) dubbed version - and there were a few occasions when I exclaimed, "Ah! I realise why he said that now!" So even with a film as slow-paced as Solaris, that gives you plenty time to read the subs, I was still missing out on the visuals.
Mind you, I am a very slow reader, partly because I am also a writer and so I like to parse what I'm reading. Maybe given time I'll be able to train my peripheral vision to take in the sub the way you do.
English language remakes have been mentioned, here and elsewhere. I'm not sure they're really relevant. The third film adaptation of Solaris (the one with Clooney) was, to my mind, just that - an independent adaptation of the Lem novel rather than a remake of the Tarkovsky movie. And, incidentally, I'd watch the Tarkovsky film redubbed by Jar Jar Binks before I'd watch the Soderbergh again.
English language remakes tend to be significantly different to the thing they are remaking. IMO Let Me In is not a bad film; it suffers in comparison with Let The Right One In, but both are reasonably interesting responses to the excellent novel - and it's not as if you can only have one or the other. The much-maligned US version of Ringu actually has a lot going for it - but I'm straying away from the point that they are not the same films!
In conclusion, I still don't think one is definitely right and one is definitely wrong, but I do think you make an excellent case for erring on the side of subs. However, I vow that I will never be insulting or condescending to people who prefer dubs, and I will never tell them not to watch the film at all, or to watch Adam Sandler instead.
As to the testimony of victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki... difficult one. I do get your point that you want to hear their words in their voices. But (it could be argued) something like that needs to reach far and wide. For every one person like you, there are probably a hundred or a thousand responding to the question, "What are you watching?" with, "Oh some Japanese guy going on about something, I dunno I can't be bothered to read the subtitles, hey, Modern Family is on the other side."
That's the clock done, now for the chairs.
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