Comment on Classic dubs seemed so much better. Now most dubs seem unwatchable
loppy@fedia.io 1 week agoThey usually condense the thought into a shorter sentence and you lose a lot of flavor in the dialogue.
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.)
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.)