As it happens, two of the shows I watched over the Christmas break were not in English. I watched all three seasons of Dark, a German-language, Stranger Things-esque time-travel drama that my housemate has been recommending for ages, as well as the first tranche of episodes of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a new TV adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, filmed in Spanish. For both shows, Netflix offered me a choice for how I would go about watching them when I speak neither German nor Spanish: in the original language with English subtitles, or dubbed into English.
Generally, I hate subtitles. Obviously, they serve a purpose for those who need them, such as anyone with hearing difficulties. But I have friends without these needs who still turn them on for everything they watch, and this is something we reliably clash over when we watch things together. I am constantly distracted by the ticker tape of words at the bottom of the screen. And it can play havoc with a show’s pacing; reading the punchline to a joke before you hear it, for instance.
Dubbing comes with its own failings, of course. Most of us have had the experience, often amusing, of watching a film that has been dubbed badly—all clunky-sounding translations and lips flapping at the wrong moments. Things are improving in this regard, though. Netflix, in particular, are betting big on dubs. Money Heist, a Spanish-language crime drama, was such an international hit that Netflix went back and redubbed the first two seasons with the new cast of voice actors it had brought together for season three. The maths are clear: if Netflix is investing in content around the world, they may as well attract as many eyes as possible by making it accessible to English speakers, too.
But, as I watched Dark and One Hundred Years of Solitude, I wondered more deliberately than usual: what is lost or gained by choosing between dubbing and subtitles?
It’s a question that is coming up more and more. Following the enormous success of Squid Game (2021), a programme in Korean that was watched by millions of people all over the world, it’s surely no longer true that audiences in the Anglosphere balk at media in other languages. Americans are no longer so afraid of “the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles”, as Bong Joon-ho joked when his film Parasite won Best Foreign Language Film at the 2020 Golden Globes. About half of all Americans, and the majority of young people, mostly watch videos with the subtitles on. The reasons for this are partly technological. We’re often playing TV shows out of crappy speakers, be they the ones in your television or in your phone—and readable words are a form of mitigation. Young people are also used to watching videos with closed captions from TikTok and Instagram Reels, where this is the norm.
Young people are used to watching videos with closed captions
I watched Dark and One Hundred Years of Solitude dubbed, in the end. And even I, traditionally a hater of subtitles, felt as though I was missing out on key elements of the performances. Intonation, even if you don’t understand the words that are being said, carries so much meaning. I was losing the sense of the show’s foreignness, too. It was sometimes too easy to forget that the characters weren’t speaking in English but in German or Spanish, with attendant German or Spanish ways of thinking.
I suspect that dubbing will eventually win out over subtitles, because a lot of people, myself included, increasingly like to multitask. In these cases the shows I was watching were somewhat hard to follow (or, in Dark’s case, very hard to follow—it introduced an alternate universe on top of the time travel in season three), so when I was watching them, I was really, 100 per cent watching them. I was not looking at my phone or cooking or having a conversation. But sometimes I do like to be doing these things, when I’m watching something more familiar or more easily understood. Is this a shame? That we pay less attention to the things we watch? Yes, I think so. But it is the way things are now.
Perhaps dubbing will advance to the stage where, unless you know, you won’t be able to tell that a series was originally filmed in another language. But something would be missing then, too. I think perhaps that foreign media should continue to feel foreign. Dubbing makes a series more accessible to a wider audience, but it also makes it seem like something that was made for us, rather than belonging to its proper cultural context. In fact, in future, I think I might opt for the subtitles—as the best of an imperfect set of choices.
