Sub or Dub: How to Choose the Version You'll Enjoy

Pick per show, and start with the habit you already have. If you watch Korean dramas or Scandinavian crime with subtitles, Japanese audio with subtitles will feel normal from the first scene. If you only put your phone down for television in English, start with the dub. Then give each new series the ten-minute test below, because the right answer moves with the material: a show that fights at speed wants your eyes on the picture, and a comedy built on Japanese puns loses something in either version. Deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers face a separate question, captions against subtitles, and it has its own section.

The ten-minute test

The conversation shows which performances you warm to; the busy sequence shows what reading costs. If you come out of the subtitled version unable to say what was happening in the background, the dub wins for this show. If a dubbed character sounds like a cartoon parody of themselves, switch back.

SPY x FAMILY makes a good first test subject. Season one is 12 episodes and the story continues, and its comedy lives on timing, so the difference between casts is audible within one scene. Compare Anya’s reactions when she overhears what the adults around her are thinking.

What each version costs you

Subtitles keep the performances the director worked with. You hear how a line was meant to land, including the honorifics and the drop from polite speech to blunt speech that tell you where two characters stand. The price is attention, because your eyes split between the text and the frame. A subtitle is also a translation squeezed to reading speed, where someone has decided which half of a pun survives.

A dub is a second production, with its own director and cast. It gives your eyes back to the picture and lets you follow along while cooking or with someone who refuses to read. It makes the same translation choices out loud, with the extra rule that the words have to fit the mouth movements, and it often arrives later than the subtitled release.

Dubs people recommend even to subtitle fans

The dub most often cited Cowboy Bebop

• 26 episodes
• complete

Bounty hunters on a battered ship take one job at a time, and the past catches up with each of them.

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Cowboy Bebop’s English dub is the standard example of a dub that long-time fans recommend alongside the original, and often ahead of it. The show borrows openly from American noir, westerns and jazz, and English dialogue sits naturally inside that world. Most episodes are self-contained jobs, so any one works for the test. Content warning: frequent gunfights, and a few deaths that land hard.

A long show with a strong dub Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

• 64 episodes
• complete

Two brothers break alchemy's one law trying to bring their mother back, and spend the series paying for it.

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Brotherhood’s English dub is widely praised, and over 64 episodes a dub spares you reading through every battle of a dense political plot. Alphonse, a boy’s voice coming out of an empty suit of armour, is the performance to test in both languages. Content warning: war atrocities, body horror and harm to a child early in the series.

Gangsters in English Baccano!

• 13 episodes
• complete

Immortals, mobsters and a pair of cheerful thieves collide on a transcontinental train in 1930s America.

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Baccano! is set among Prohibition-era gangsters and thieves in New York and on a train out of Chicago, which makes an English cast playing American characters an easy fit, and its dub turns up regularly when people list the best ones. The story jumps between three years out of order, so either version asks for your full attention. Isaac and Miria, two thieves who understand very little and enjoy everything, are the comic centre. Content warning: graphic gore, particularly aboard the train.

Mercenaries who swear in English Black Lagoon

• Season one
• 12 episodes
• continues in The Second Barrage

A Japanese office worker is taken hostage by smugglers and decides to stay with them.

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Black Lagoon follows Rock, a salaryman kidnapped by a crew of mercenary smugglers, who stays on with them in a lawless Southeast Asian port. Most of the cast is from somewhere other than Japan, so English dialogue suits the setting, and the English dub has a strong reputation among fans of the show. Content warning: constant graphic gun violence and heavy swearing.

When subtitles carry more

Some shows are built out of the Japanese language itself, and those are where subtitled audio tends to keep more. Bakemonogatari, 15 episodes from 2009, is fast, dense dialogue full of puns on names and written characters, with text cards flashing past mid-scene. Every version needs workarounds there, but the Japanese performances deliver the rhythm the jokes were written for. Gintama, 201 episodes in its first series, parodies Japanese television, adverts and other anime, and much of its humour is a reference that needs a footnote in any language.

School stories show a quieter version of the same problem. When a character switches from calling a classmate by surname and honorific to first name alone, a Japanese audience hears a relationship change. A subtitle can keep the honorific; a dub has to invent an English equivalent or lose it.

Captions are not subtitles

If you are deaf or hard of hearing, or you watch with the sound off, a standard anime subtitle track is built for someone else. The W3C describes captions as text “for the same language as the spoken audio” and subtitles as text “for spoken audio translated into another language”. Captions also carry sound effects, music cues and who is speaking. Look for tracks labelled SDH (subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing) or CC. The GKIDS Blu-ray of Wolf Children, a 2012 film about a woman raising two half-wolf children alone, lists English and Japanese audio with English, English SDH, Spanish and French subtitles. The US Blu-ray of Vivy -Fluorite Eye’s Song-, a 13-episode series about a singing android, lists Japanese and English audio with English subtitles.

Turn on English subtitles while watching a dub and the words will often fail to match the voices, because the subtitles translate the Japanese script while the dub uses its own adapted one. The reverse has a name: “dubtitles”, an English text track that transcribes the dub script and is sometimes offered as the only English option. On Japanese audio, dubtitles show you lines rewritten to fit English mouths instead of a translation of what the Japanese cast is saying. For a deaf viewer watching the dub, a track that matches the English audio word for word is exactly what you want.

Sub or dub at a glance

Watch one series dubbed because you are tired, another subtitled because the lead is doing something you want to hear untranslated, and a film dubbed because the person beside you refuses to read. If neither version holds you, the format was never the problem, and the first-show guide will help more than the audio menu. If Bebop’s dub won you over, anime like Cowboy Bebop has more in the same vein, and the film guide covers single evenings.