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Comment by jonpurdy | Hacker News Reader

> I think there's a lot of gatekeeping about this. People - perhaps rightfully so - believe subtitled versions to be more ... "pure" than dubbed versions.

Well, they are more pure than dubbed versions. There is so much nuance and tone in the original language that is either left out or changed in the dub. Not to mention word order (subject-verb-object in English/Chinese, subject-object-verb in Japanese/Korean) that further changes the timing of impactful words.

I am not looking forward to having to watch the dub versions of Totoro and other Miyazaki films when my daughter is between 2-7 years old...

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There's often a lot of nuance lost in translated subtitles as well, in my experience, often because dialogue written for one language can't be coerced into natural dialogue in a different language without significant changes.

Keeping the original audio track does preserve the direct relationship between the actor's tone and expressions, of course, and it could also be something closer to what the original makers intended even if the voice actors in a dub also do a good job.

The audio track also feels somehow more right and authentic when someone who's supposedly Japanese speaks Japanese, or when a supposedly French person speaks French, or when people in a show set in California speak English rather than somehow magically speaking your native language.

Then there's of course the question of dealing with scripts that have multiple languages spoken in them. Something would surely be lost if multiple languages were dubbed into the same third language. It's often easy to recognize the different languages being spoken even if one does not understand them.

Very good point. I do get frustrated when watching Korean media with my wife and needing Korean subs for myself and English for her. I notice that the subs frequently mistranslate, or convert to a Western equivalent, which drops the nuance. ie. Korean honorifics, or differentiation between older and younger female/male siblings, which can get totally lost when translated to English.

Though this is much less of an issue when watching fansubbed media (for Japanese content, anyway) because the fans have translator notes and do a much better job than Netflix or media studio translators.

> There's often a lot of nuance lost in translated subtitles as well.

Famously, the closing dialog for Breathless, er, À bout de souffle doesn't translate to English.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peS6ADDysms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathless_(1960_film)#Closing...

(It should go w/o saying reading this is a small spoiler and you should most definitely see this film first if you haven't. I happen to think the American remake is trash, but my dad loves both it and the original. In any case, it is among a small handful of films that I consider perfect.)

> Then there's of course the question of dealing with scripts that have multiple languages spoken in them. Something would surely be lost if multiple languages were dubbed into the same third language.

I've sometimes thought that languages could be indicated by phonetic rendering of an accent (an audio version of this was done on the excellent and clever show 'Allo 'Allo where dialog in 'French' is English with a French accent, dialog in English is RP, British characters badly speaking 'French' use RP with funny word substitutions, and so on), similar to how comics often indicate other languages in word balloons with conventions such as <angle brackets> or italicization, but that's probably too high a bar.

When I was a kid, my dad was stationed in Japan. We watched all kinds of stuff, including Totoro on Japanese TV. No subtitles or dubs. Not a clue what they were actually saying but we all enjoyed it anyways. So you could always try it out and see how it goes.

I don't know why I didn't think of this before... thanks! I will definitely try that out, especially since at such a young age she won't be able to sit through a whole film anyway.

I have been watching dubs of Ghibli with my kids. It’s fine. It would be better to watch the subs for me, but I’m not going to get bent out of shape about it. They usually have pretty good English voice casting. I kind of like Kirstin Dunst as Kiki.

Yes... but all that nuance and tone is largely lost on 90% of the foreign market who can't understand the native language in the first place.

And for the record, Chinese also makes heavy use of SOV, eg 他們昨天到韓國去了。

And Japanese also makes extensive use of SVO or OVS and similar, eg 本はよんだ、君が？

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