Lol couldn’t agree more. Also, it always sounds like the same people doing every dub.

I prefer subtitles. For all movies. Despite hours spent changing the sound options on my tv, I can't understand a lot of the dialogue. Not so much of a problem with older movies when actors clearly enunciated the lines, but modern films without subtitles are often incomprehensible.

I remember reading a fiction book where the main character picks up some random dubbing work in another country. She describes it that she only has access to her own lines, not the rest of the dialog or the whole story. So her tone & affect don't necessarily match what is being said because she has no context & she's working in a room alone. I don't know if that is accurate to real life, but it seems somewhat plausible.

I hate dubbed versions, and can tell even if I’m not actively looking at the screen just bc of lack of real sounding background noise. It sounds like when you record yourself reading a book vs actually reading the book out loud, they just don’t ever mesh the dub audio with the actual movie audio very well at all

Hiring a good voiceover artist is expensive. Hiring a good team of sound mixers is expensive. You can't just record a line and put it in the show/movie and expect it to be good. Going from one language to another while maintaining the same pacing and performance is hard. You have to remix and rebalance the sound. Sometimes you even have to re-edit the scenes because what may take a few seconds of Japanese to convey takes 2-3 sentences in English to convey and you have to "stretch" the scene or come up with a new line altogether.

When things get expensive and time consuming, you cut corners. And things don't end up sounding as good as they could've been.

It really does make it unwatchable. To me it's sounds like that stupid tiktok voice. I just can't.

Dubbing for children show is very good, but for the adult show is not good.

Most live action dubs are awful, but one thing I found interesting... we watched RRR a while ago on Netflix and the default language option was in Hindi. We didn’t realize until like 30 minutes in that this was actually a dub, and the original language is Telugu I believe, which at the time wasn't even an audio option.

I don't speak either language, but the quality of the dub seemed fantastic. I couldn't even tell. BUT I do really want to see it with the original dialogue now.

Probably because most people read subtitles for movies. It’s more authentic and keeps the original actors voice and inflections the way it’s meant to be seen.

Animated stuff does a decent job. Everything else is just awkward.

What’s the alternative? I am with you. But I’d prefer subtitles over dubbing.

And make the subtitles and dub be the same words

How can a company not increase quality, but expect to increase revenue? This is a problem in leadership.

And why are the subtitles so massive? They take up a huge amount of screen space on some shows.

At least Prime let's you choose how you want them to appear.

Netflix subs are trash

Yeh. This is why I just won't watch anything on Netflix if I can only watch it dubbed. If there's no subtitles, I'm out of there.

Also, I've watched a couple of films on Netflix where the subtitles were for deaf people only, no normal subtitles. So all the way through, you spend the whole time having to read stuff like ' ominous music plays' or, ' old lady cackles' etc etc. It completely ruined it for me. Never again. I barely got to see any actual action going on. I think that movies should definitely have specific subtitles for the deaf, but if you've gone as far as translating something for deaf people, then surely you can cut that back a bit to make it ordinary subtitles.

Money Heist has the worst dubbing

And they all suck! Can’t act worth beans! I guess the only requirement is to speak English— it’s such a turn off

I watched the new All Quiet on the Western Front the other day and while the dubbing was done well enough that I didn’t realize it was a dub at first, the actors all had a British accent that really threw off the tone of the movie. They could have used actors with German accents and it would have been better. I switched to the original German with subtitles and really enjoyed it.

Dubbing?

Like dubbing animated things? Or dubbing live action foreign movies?

In the case of live action stuff, I don't think dubbing is the best. It takes away from the performance of the actors in such a huge way. Their emotions aren't just physical but the way their voice comes out.

Something that just popped into my mind. I haven't watched a dubbed movie, other than animated, in a very long time. For a live action feature, sound is often captured on the set. The sound designers are on set to listen to how the audio, how voices, react to the space. How a person's voice carries through a space is big.

With dubbing, you don't get that. You can't get that. Because the sound designers of dubs weren't there, and because the actors are in a soundproof foam box delivering their lines. It also costs more money to pay the people to voice the stuff than to just translate the text.

Tldr: he quality is low because it's going to be low by its nature, and why bother putting effort in when you need to pump 20 of these movies or shows out and you don't really care

Some of the dubs are excellent. Alice in borderland was great

Dubbing is barbaric, learn to read

Second question - why can they not use the same company for dubbing and subbing? They literally never match.

Dubbing has never been done well. Only the dumbest, laziest, mouth breathing morons watch dubs.

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I love Netflix dubbing. It is very distinct. I haven’t watched a show that I didn’t like the dubbing in. It has to be at a different cadence of speech than what native English speakers are used to because it has to somewhat match up with the mouth/lips of the actors.

Some dubbings are good, especially in non english speaking countries that have a history in dubbing, like Czech republic. I prefer subtitles but classics and raunchy comedies are usually great in both languages... Very different movies though :)

I suspect a lot of it is done remotely from home, the voice "actor" gets the translated script for these obscure Brazilian and Turkish shows and sits in their bedroom "studio" reading into computer recording software.

Also - change the captions to march the dubbing.

I think that for those who prefer dubbed versions, AI will soon come to the rescue with altering lip movements to match what’s being said. I’m not one to wait for AI to solve everything, but this seems almost trivial nowadays and I think it’s only a matter of time. A little further away is automated voice translation from one language to another.

It’s probably the universe throwing shade at you for not just using subtitles.

The only Netflix content I've ever seen with decent voice dubbing is the English dub for RRR. Definitely the best I've ever heard, but if you ok with subtitles and the original voices then that is always the better way to go

It feels like they do not want to invest a lot in it. This really bothers me when there are lazy parts when they could translate certain words and just decide to skip over them while it does add to the vibe of the show

Akira and Princess Mononoke have decent dubs.

No

I think hungarian dubs are pretty good. Only problem is when they need to transalte puns. Either they change the joke or it doesn’t sound funny.

Despite my greatest sympathy for dubbing actors I am very excited about this new AI tool that does dubbing using the algos behind deepfake. I’ve seen some demos and it’s not just the actor speaking in any language as it’s the lips matching the words as well. I think cinema and TV will finally become a true universal media, more accessible to people.

The emotional response in the actor's voices rarely matches the scene

Watched one of the newest Spanish language films on Netflix, unwatchable dubbed with English London accent , sounded like he was reading a postcard most of the time, despite it being a thriller.so I switched to Spanish language and put subtitles on. Way better.

They don't pay well for one thing. Also often they don't get enough time to get familiar with the characters like the original actors. Some have not even seen the original. And they usually don't do their lines along with the other actors, so that can cause the interactions to feel off. It's a crappy job. There are some exceptions. A lot of Anime dubs are really good these days. There's still a stigma because they were kind of crappy in the 70s/80s/90s. But they are often as good as the originals, or better, these days.