🇬🇧🇪🇸Sub vs Dub: Film, Language & Accessibility (EN & ES)

Despite having lived most of my life in Spain, I always watch films in their original language with subtitles. This is mostly due to my father’s practice of watching them with me in this format, as well as teaching me how to change the language setting on our TV when I was young and left alone with the glowing box. My being bilingual in both Spanish and English clearly played a big part in why this was easy for me to do, with a lot of the media readily available to me, but even when I started watching anime and K-dramas on my own, I kept this practice.

I say ‘despite’ having lived most of my life in Spain because, generally speaking, the culture in my country is precisely the opposite. In fact, the only times I haven’t watched a subbed version of a foreign film or TV show were because I was at a friend’s house or at school, and was always outvoted despite my insistence on watching it in its original language, in what for years I believed was the ‘right way’.

My point of view was only reinforced when I joined my current film school in Spain, where most of my teachers were vocal about how dubbing was a ‘disgrace’, and ‘ruined the art of filmmaking’. They have some good arguments in their arsenal, such as the fact that actors lose a solid 50% of their performance when watching a dubbed version (as their voice is just as important as their gestures), and that Spanish dubs have historically been pretty ‘cringey’, to the point that a common joke is pretending to do the ‘Spanish dub [male or female] voice’, which everybody seems to instinctually recognise and is capable of imitating.