There's often a lot of nuance lost in translated subtitles as well, in my experience, often because dialogue written for one language can't be coerced into natural dialogue in a different language without significant changes.
Keeping the original audio track does preserve the direct relationship between the actor's tone and expressions, of course, and it could also be something closer to what the original makers intended even if the voice actors in a dub also do a good job.
The audio track also feels somehow more right and authentic when someone who's supposedly Japanese speaks Japanese, or when a supposedly French person speaks French, or when people in a show set in California speak English rather than somehow magically speaking your native language.
Then there's of course the question of dealing with scripts that have multiple languages spoken in them. Something would surely be lost if multiple languages were dubbed into the same third language. It's often easy to recognize the different languages being spoken even if one does not understand them.
Very good point. I do get frustrated when watching Korean media with my wife and needing Korean subs for myself and English for her. I notice that the subs frequently mistranslate, or convert to a Western equivalent, which drops the nuance. ie. Korean honorifics, or differentiation between older and younger female/male siblings, which can get totally lost when translated to English.
Though this is much less of an issue when watching fansubbed media (for Japanese content, anyway) because the fans have translator notes and do a much better job than Netflix or media studio translators.
> Then there's of course the question of dealing with scripts that have multiple languages spoken in them. Something would surely be lost if multiple languages were dubbed into the same third language.
I've sometimes thought that languages could be indicated by phonetic rendering of an accent (an audio version of this was done on the excellent and clever show 'Allo 'Allo where dialog in 'French' is English with a French accent, dialog in English is RP, British characters badly speaking 'French' use RP with funny word substitutions, and so on), similar to how comics often indicate other languages in word balloons with conventions such as <angle brackets> or italicization, but that's probably too high a bar.
(It should go w/o saying reading this is a small spoiler and you should most definitely see this film first if you haven't. I happen to think the American remake is trash, but my dad loves both it and the original. In any case, it is among a small handful of films that I consider perfect.)
Keeping the original audio track does preserve the direct relationship between the actor's tone and expressions, of course, and it could also be something closer to what the original makers intended even if the voice actors in a dub also do a good job.
The audio track also feels somehow more right and authentic when someone who's supposedly Japanese speaks Japanese, or when a supposedly French person speaks French, or when people in a show set in California speak English rather than somehow magically speaking your native language.
Then there's of course the question of dealing with scripts that have multiple languages spoken in them. Something would surely be lost if multiple languages were dubbed into the same third language. It's often easy to recognize the different languages being spoken even if one does not understand them.