Comment on Classic dubs seemed so much better. Now most dubs seem unwatchable
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 week ago
Two things with subtitles I do not like:
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I watch anime primarily for the animation and having to read tbe text on the bottom or top of the screen takes my eyes away from the action.
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They usually condense the thought into a shorter sentence and you lose a lot of flavor in the dialogue.
The most egregious thing I have seen regarding item 2 was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It’s so bland and boring with the subtitles vs the english dubbing. And it annoys me that every streaming service that has the film, has the subbed version.
And another thing regarding the argument itself is that how would you know the Japanese acting is good unless you understand Japanese? Ironically, the Japanese ends up more hammy than the English, because that’s what Japanese theatre is all about: wild exaggeration.
loppy@fedia.io 1 week ago
I have never found this to be true (as someone who knows some Japanese). If you're just comparing sentence lengths, that's a broken comparison: it's been shown that Japanese is less information dense per-syllable than English, so an English translation of Japanese will tend to have a shorter length. (And to compensate, Japanese is spoken faster than English on average.)
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 week ago
I am not just comparing the length of the words. I am talking about how subtitles tend to be very basic and just get the gist of the point across.
loppy@fedia.io 1 week ago
I would respond to that also with "I have never found this to be true" (or at least the vast majority of subtitles I have read I would not characterize that way). But of course there's no real way for me to deny your own experience, unless you want to give specific examples.
(Also, l am talking about anime and typical anime subtitles. I just noticed that you mentioned Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; I think it's very possible live-action subtitles are done in a categorically different way from anime subtitles.)