Subtitles don't match dubbing.

[Dripping]

I'm attempting to learn Czech by watching movies. I've watched several Czech movies, and the speech and subtitles are always exactly the same or very close. But now I'm watching "Interview With The Vampire" with Czech dubbing and Czech subtitles. Most of the time the subtitles and dubbing are a lot different. I'm using DVDs.

Does anyone know the reason for that? And is it common for dubbed movies? Thanks.

[Flitskikker]

Dubbing and subtitle translations are usually different (at least for Dutch).

Subtitling is based on the original (e.g. English) audio. These should match closely, because the viewer can hear the original audio while reading the subtitle translation.

With dubs, the viewer cannot hear the original audio, so the translation can differ from the original dialogue.
Usually, the focus is more on lip sync, i.e. that the translation better matches the moving mouths.
They can also change some of the dialogue entirely for localization purposes. For example, change a conversation about baseball into a conversation about football, if baseball is not well known in the target country. The original audio isn't available, so no one will notice.

So, when you watch the dubbed version with subtitles, there can be many differences.
Then you can hear the characters talk about football while the subtitles are about baseball (because those were made for the original audio).

You could check if there are CC subtitles. Usually, for Dutch, the "Dutch" subtitles are a translation for the English audio, and the "Dutch (CC)" subtitles are a transcript of the dubbed audio.

Hope this helps.

[Dripping]

Thank you very much, that's a great explanation. I hope the dubbing is still natural, I'm worried they might try too hard to force it to match the movement of the mouths. I'll look for movies with closed captions.