this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2026
26 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
54645 readers
618 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I find that infuriating, too. Someone told me the reason is that the dubbing and the subtitling are done in parallel from the original material, instead of the subtitling being done from the dubbing text. Regardless, it's super annoying to miss a word in the spoken dialog and find that the subtitles have a completely different sentence.
Tom Scott made a enjoyable video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU9sHwNKc2c
tl:dr dubbing and subtitles are made by diffent teams and each one has their own limitations.
Dubbing has to line up with lip movement. Subtitles were in the past summeries and struggle for example when multible people are talking at the same time
That was very informative, thank you! I love Tom Scott's videos, but somehow missed this one.
The odd thing is that he brings up the obvious question: why do the subtitlers not simply use the dubber's translation instead of doing their own. He brings up the need in the past for summaries (which could be done from the dubber's translation, so I don't see the point), but then doesn't explain why we still do the same.
It's particularly odd because streaming brought a Renaissance of dubbing - streaming shows are frequently dubbed, dubbed to a lot of languages, and the dubbing is of high quality. On some streaming services (I think Netflix), the dubbing teams proudly have their own closing cards at the end of each episode. And yet, they continue this strange habit.
True, they are doing the work of translating twice.
And sometimes there are existing two types of subtitles, but the standard case is that it's based on the original language. For learning italian i searched a lot for subtitles that are based on the italian dupped version. It often has a "forced" in the filename (and is unfortunatly quite difficult to find)