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Survey: How do you prefer to watch anime?

Quote:

If you've got the choice between a Japanese dub with subtitles or an alternate language dub with absolute translation fidelity and equal acting quality, then the latter should be the natural choice

Can't say I agree. First off, anime *tends* to take place in Japan, or star japanese people. The fact that in an english dub they're NOT speaking Japanese is inappropriate. If I'm watching a French movie that takes place in France starring French people, I'm sure as heck going to watch it with the French audio, and I don't see why that would be any different for anime.

This is coming from a life long dub hater though, so an anime having an english dub with a cast of equal quality is an extreme hypothetical to me anyhow

In response to penguintruth and posterior_praiser:

Well I don't know about that myself. I'm perfectly fine watching a live-action foreign film in its original language with subtitles. But for something animated its less of an issue to me since animated characters do not actually have their own voice. Unless its a big budget film, then the issues about lip syncing are null since its just a matter of the actor timing their voice to the mouth flaps. They are doing the same thing as the english actors and recording the voices after the animation is done. I think it is a bit much to call it xenophobic to prefer to have the same opportunity as the Japanese and watch a show in your native language without a constant stream of text popping up on the screen. As I said before I don't really care either way how I watch it. But more often than not I watch it dubbed since that what I've become accustomed to as a life-long animation fan. In the end its about people watching anime so who really care how they watch it as long as they are watching it? Yes there might be some things lost in translation when going from Japanese to English, but it works the other way around too.

Okay, this doesn't hold much water here.
Do you like watching Afro Samurai in English? After all, the English voice track was recorded first.

@ Shadowrun: Australian isn't a language. They speak English down under just as we do.

nagashi wrote:

Quote: If you've got the choice between a Japanese dub with subtitles or an alternate language dub with absolute translation fidelity and equal acting quality, then the latter should be the natural choice Can't say I agree. First off, anime *tends* to take place in Japan, or star japanese people. The fact that in an english dub they're NOT speaking Japanese is inappropriate. If I'm watching a French movie that takes place in France starring French people, I'm sure as heck going to watch it with the French audio, and I don't see why that would be any different for anime. This is coming from a life long dub hater though, so an anime having an english dub with a cast of equal quality is an extreme hypothetical to me anyhow

Okay, this doesn't hold much water here.
Do you like watching Afro Samurai in English? After all, the English voice track was recorded first.

@ Shadowrun: Australian isn't a language. They speak English down under just as we do.

about the xenophobia comment, I don't think anime fans on the whole are like that at all. I was more referring to the general public and foreign films, which I do think suffer from that problem. Native English speakers in North America especially seem to have more of a problem then most when it comes to watching or listening to things that are not in English. The lack of quality foreign language flims that make it to the big theatres here attests to that.

penguintruth wrote:

I have to laugh at the people who have the attitude of, "I don't want to read and watch, I don't care if the dub is inferior." Is it that tough to follow subtitles? If you watch enough subtitled anime, it becomes like second nature, you don't even notice that you have to read.

I've watched at least a decent amount of fansubs (including 200 episodes and counting of One Piece), and I'm still noticing that I have to read every single time I glance down at the edge of the screen. To me, the fact that I read quickly enough to do so is irrelevant; in my mind, anything that distracts me from taking in the entirety of what's going on in a scene is detrimental to my enjoyment of it.

Before watching anime, I was into foreign language cinema, so it only seemed natural to me to watch anything in a foreign language with English subtitles. In Australia we have a free-to-air network called SBS which shows mostly multicultural programming. This has probably had a big influence on how I watch foreign language shows. But unlike almost all of their live action programming, anime is almost shown dubbed, which is really odd.