[aikinai]

Agree Japanese subtitles are absolute garbage—I once made the stupid mistake of using Japanese subtitles watching a comedy on a date with someone that didn’t speak English.

However, the dubs are the complete opposite. They pack in a ton of the original subtext and nuance, character quirks, etc, even making new jokes when necessary to convey something similar when the original is impossible. And of course the voice actors are great.

Japanese subtitles being terrible isn’t necessarily a natural state. It seems to just be where things landed in that industry.

[fomine3]

Yeah Japanese sub is too much omitted. It's designed to just understand meaning quickly. People understand emotions from original actors' voice (though I doubt is it precise). Movie on theater can't be paused, so very long annotation like anime fansub isn't possible. Drama translation is done by same culture.

Over the half of people (including many non movie enthusiasts) prefer dub, but sub is very popular in the internet because such people is verbose. I like sub for English (that I can understand a bit and good for learning), dub for the rest.