I want to watch the new Netflix series “Dark” but can’t stand when it’s dubbed into another language; the lips don’t sync up! How can I have English closed captioning or subtitles show up too?
Another fan of the fantastic, creepy German-language Netflix original series Dark. Nice! If you don’t like dubbed English, however, you definitely need to learn how to tune the spoken and subtitle language for this, and many other shows. Plenty of people prefer dubbed films because it’s less work, but I’ve always preferred a film or TV series in its native tongue, whether it’s Italian, Japanese, Spanish or whatever else. That’s what subtitles are for. There’s just something more impactful and authentic about a film with its original language and its actors speaking their own lines in their own voices.
I actually first realized this when I watched both the dubbed English version of the brilliant xx film Das Boot and then watched it again in the original German with English subtitles. It’s really a completely different film and while subtitles are a bit more work, if I see a film or TV show, I always opt to have the original language, whether I speak it or not. Another great foreign language Netflix series, by the way, is the wry and hilarious A Very Secret Service, which is all in French.
Anyway, turns out the way you choose the audio track and specify a closed caption or subtitle is different depending on how you access Netflix. But we’ll get there. For now, let’s just start with the basics: How do choose language and subtitles within a Web browser.
Surprisingly, it’s not something that’s obvious from the series information view:
Go to the specific show and it just starts playing with whatever Netflix thinks is your preference. For me, it was dubbed English and it took me a few minutes of horribly out-of-sync lips for me to realize what was going on. No subtitles, just the show:
Move the cursor over the view window, however, and a bunch of things pop up to help you navigate:
The bottom buttons, left to right, are play/pause, audio volume/mute, ep information, the “?” to get more info on the stream, a skip feature, a quick episode index if you want to pop to a different episode, the audio stream / closed captioning options that we want, the chromecast button for sending the video feed to a television, and the full-screen button. Hopefully they’re mostly familiar as they’re essential to getting the most out of your Netflix viewing!
Let’s back up to the audio channel button, however. A click and you’ll see there are a number of options:
You can, of course, mix and match what you prefer here, and even switch to dubbed English with no subtitles at all if that’s what you prefer. Make a choice and within a few seconds the stream changes to reflect it. Easy enough.
If you’re casting to a more sophisticated device, note that there are more options:
Needless to say, if you have a sophisticated TV audio system and can decode Dolby Digital Plus 5.1, then you should definitely choose it over the regular Stereo. It will sound noticeably better and be a lot more creepy, at least in the case of Dark.
Hope that helps you get the most out of your Netflix viewing as they add more and more foreign language content.