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> In Germany this means that there are actually really good voice over artists that dub so well (sync with the actor's lips so well) you can barely tell the audio is not original.

I seriously doubt that. In France we also have dubs that are considered extremely good (Back to the Future is a big one), but you stil can easily tell it's not the original audio. And it absolutely loses a lot compared to the original. I wish I grew up with subtitles instead of dubs wherever possible.

Dubs only make sense for cartoons and animation (South Park and The Simpsons come to mind as having better dubs in French than in the original version).

As a Flemish person, I really hate dubbing. And so does anyone who grew up reading subtitles instead of dubbing.

I'm also certain that this is the main reason why the average person in a subtitle country (Flanders, Netherlands, Nordic countries, ...) speaks way better English than in the dubbing countries.

> In Germany this means that there are actually really good voice over artists that dub so well (sync with the actor's lips so well) you can barely tell the audio is not original.

It's weird how perceptions can differ. I found that German dubs are pretty bad, you lose pretty much all emotion in it and if you don't know the language spoken in the movie, using subtitles is preferable over German audio.

> I also grew up with the luxury of having learnt English well enough from young age to a proficiency that I can watch movies in English just as well as in my mother's tongue.

Chicken and egg, really. You get much better at understanding English if you watch movies. My reading comprehension shot up when we were offered a subscription of Time magazine at very affordable rates (for secondary school students).

> So, as far as I can tell, they're very far from creating "common European culture".

Hopefully. But if anyone does, please don't do it by translating it into any and all languages. Let's just settle on English and slowly fade out traditional European languages to a heritage thing that you learn for fun and use on special occasions with your grand parents.

> It's weird how perceptions can differ. I found that German dubs are pretty bad, you lose pretty much all emotion in it and if you don't know the language spoken in the movie, using subtitles is preferable over German audio.

German dubbing, and really dubbing in general, is a regular subject of mockery in Norway where we're used to sub-titles, as a thing that makes anything unwatchable whether or not you know German. I think peoples ability to deal with dubbing is strongly dependent on whether or not you grew up with it.

That's likely, yeah, though I know some people (including me) that grew up on pretty much German-only, at some point transitioned to English for movies and shows and now won't go back. It's probably not just a dub-thing as pretty much all of them prefer English over German in general.

> One thing that Netflix is absolutely terrible at is dubbing. As a German, I grew up with the luxury of all movies shown on TV (Hollywood or European) being dubbed (this is not true for many of our neighboring countries).

Being from one of those neighbouring countries, it’s hard to understand what’s so great about dubbing, and I guess back home people kind of feel sorry for the countries where dubbing is the norm.

Only television for young children is dubbed, because usually they can’t read or read fast enough yet, and growing up reading subtitles becomes a second nature. Once you’re used to them, it’s hard to understand what added benefit dubbing would then bring… Except from an accessibility point of view—I know not everybody can read, and I know there are dedicated dubs for the visually impaired.

The benefits of subtitles are many though—of course first and foremost you get to enjoy the sounds and atmosphere of another language while still being able to understand it. And then being confronted with a language often enough will be a massive help in learning it. English of course is the main language people learn this way, but when I learned French and German in high school the French and German spoken movies on TV and in the cinema definitely helped.

So I guess what I mean to say—of course it’s simply the result of the economical reality of living in a smaller linguistic area, but subtitles feel quite the luxury to me!

It’s interesting to hear that Netflix’s dubbing is subpar though, and I see how that could hurt their bottom-line since in most bigger countries dubbing is the norm.

Some dubbing was and is also quite bad. Several examples come to mind where I was forced to acknowledge I should rather watch everything in the original if I could due to the huge number of translation mistakes .

There are some notable exceptions though. Animated movies in particular, like Ice Age where you just could feel the difference between B-Level US actors/comedians vs A-Level German voice overs and comedians (Otto).

Same here. I grown up in Czechoslovakia where everything is dubbed with high quality. Netflix dubbing sounds to me like somebody just reading the script. What I slso hate when englisg dubbing and subtitles doesn’t match.

If some young person, maybe here, could figure out how to dub seamlessly, and realistically; they could make a fortune with the technology.

Well, you could make a very modes fortune, possibly. Dubbing isn't exactly a high margin high volume market.

I guess this would require deepfaking updated lip movements into the actors' faces - so that they're not out of sync anymore - and I don't think we're that far away. (Personally I'm not a fan of dubbing, but that's another story).