Sub or Dub

[Ginger Tea]

This is predominantly Anime based as I have not encountered much in the way of dubbed foreign films since "unsynchronised English" 70's, though I did hear a snippet of a dubbed "One missed Call." on YouTube a few minutes ago and for some strange reason my UK DVD of the saint defaulted to German Audio and I thought at first the child version of him was meant to be speaking German till they brought up his Aussie accent in a current scene I honestly wasn't looking at his lip-sync as I was too busy reading wondering when he would speak English.

Before the Anime boom spearheaded in the UK by Manga Entertainment and which ever were the pioneers in the States other than US Manga corp. we had dubbed TV shows for years on Children's TV, they had to be dubbed as no 8 year old would care to read a 10 minute show with Japanese audio and others although Anime in design were European written contracted out so the mouths moved more in time to the language it was written for not dubbed to.
But of those I can not say for sure.

It was a long time till we got Japanese audio VHS tapes, well we might not have had any in the UK, I bowed out 2 years after the initial boom when I had little money to spare and after Guyver's long run on VHS I had little left to buy another full length movie with, Guyver was one or two episodes for a few pounds less than a 60-90 OVA, if I had more money I could have gotten a Guyver tape and a movie a month, instead it was 3 Guyvers and a movie every 3 months and when Guyver ended with no closure I was done.

Plus it didn't help that the market was saturated with dross, rights were being bought up just to fill a gap in the release schedule and I had a lot of the first releases, we didn't know these were bad as we had never heard of them before and there was no imdb or rotten tomatoes to check against.
I didn't mind the dubbing on most of them as they were comical story lines and the bad dubbing by some voice actors added to it, but I had heard clips of the dubbed Akira and was glad I never bought that one going for the 2 tape sub instead, I felt the choices let it down and also the changes in dialogue from the subtitled script to what was heard, I would not be able to enjoy that movie with Michelangelo spouting off.

When they dubbed the first few years the probably had a small pool of voice actors to work with and the same shitty voice coming out of dozens of characters mouths over different shows probably wore thin for some, but some of the stories I enjoyed dubbed were just too damn stupid to care about things like that.

I had a longer affinity with live action Japanese movies and they were always subbed, dubbing live action is rather taboo, unless used for comedic effect like 'on the water front's ' redubbing and re editing of 'the flashing blade' for children's Saturday morning TV.
My only gripe was either Ran or Kagamuska, which I might have fudged the name of, had a character talking with white borderless text bleeding into his white gown.
Until hard subs were moved to the black bars of widescreen VHS movies it was always hit and miss if you could read the damn text, but I would take hard to read over bad voice casting.*

Outside of getting some of my old VHS on DVD or vhs rips if no longer sold, I am rather meh towards Anime but Japanese movies I still watch, Korean ones too, recently bought too many Tartan Asia Extreme DVD's for £4 each.

I was turned off as stated due to the saturation of the market with dross far more than any bad voice acting (Akira was the only one I took offence to)
But now a days I would be more inclined to seek out a dual option, that way I can see if the voice acting has improved and also try and pick up more words in context, but not the kind to throw in kawai in every sentence cos I learnt a new word.
Animation I've seen as language neutral as some of the Japanese releases never lined up well with the language to begin with, but outside of Disney and Hanna Barbera I have not explored foreign animation*, but live action from any country, Subtitles please.

Edit:
Although the Water Margin and Monkey are two prime examples where the Dubbed is preferred, possibly due to the script being way different to what was originally performed, but I have not got the DVD of Water Margin to hand to see if it offers Japanese audio and do not have Monkey at all to check against.
And I should also add Transformers and Thunder cats and a few other American toy line shows too.

[fireheart17]

I tend to view anime dubbing on a case-by-case basis. Here's the way I've seen them:

Sailor Moon: HORRIBLE. Always inconsistent between episodes (right down to the attacks) and then there was the best moment of all....the changing of a homosexual relationship to an incestuous one . Couple that with some horrendous voices from the third season onwards and...gyahhh....fingers crossed the reboot will ACTUALLY WORK.

Pokemon: Initially, like nearly all 4kids dubs, CRAP. In terms of sub-to-dub, they kept quite a few things in compared to other shows, but the puns and the "riceball-shaped donuts" were just....ugh. Although my personal favourite had to be when they translated Brock's song. In Japan, it's Takeshi's Paradise and an ending song. In English, it was simply an insert song. At least they kept the gag in, but the lyrics just sounded more perverted. When the current dub folks took over, they kept the song in but made the lyrics less perverted.
At least unlike Sailor Moon, the VA's actually SOUND good. They fit the characters PERFECTLY. Although I do wish that they didn't keep ALL the voices from the sub for the Pokemon themselves...(Leavanny's voice sounds very effeminate)

Chobits: One of my first exposures to more "adult" anime. Literally. I actually found that with this one, because the idea is centred around the protagonist teaching an android about everyday life, some of the concepts don't carry over too well to the English dub. They're translated, sure, but it just sounds off in general.

Negima: This comes in two flavours. Now I have my OWN notes on this one. Similar to Chobits, fairly accurate overall, with a few things that just sound bizarre:

-the main character (a 10-year-old boy) has a somewhat horrible squeaky voice. British accent yes, but horrible sound. It's worse when he has to scream.

-Negi (10-year-old teacher!) ends up teaching English, but in the Japanese version, it's English as a second language. In the English version, it jumps back and forth. One episode has the ESL lesson, another episode has them looking at Shakespeare (with my favourite dialogue in there between Kaede and Fuka as follows (Kaede's first line is offscreen)

Japanese version:

Kaede: So "na-meh"?
Fuka: No, it's "name!"
Kaede: Oh, I'm bad with these imported tongues.

English version:

Kaede: So Hamlet was a pastry?
Fuka: No Kaede, he was Danish as in from Denmark!
Kaede: Oh, I thought it was symbolic or something.

The voices...a bit mixed on. The second version was MUCH better in terms of the voice acting and translations. Because there's very little of the actual class in progress, the dialogue can SOUND more accurate. They also translated the opening and closing themes almost accurately!

Haruhi Suzumiya: Meh, a bit mixed on this one too.

[Ginger Tea]

When I watched the 70's remake of Nosferatu I thought it was a case of dubbing as the lip-sync was out, but it wasn't enough to detract from the film.
Turns out it was an English language filmed scene, just some bits were out of sync.
The actors filmed the scenes in German then reset for English, but as the actors were German they all felt they gave a better performance in German, so that one if they were to have dual language should have been dubbed to begin with as now it feels I have been given a sub par performance for the sake of not dubbing.

I watched a Gamestation podcast which featured dubbing gone wrong, they paced the dialogue to the longest recording, so the English one came across stilted to match the pre rendered lip-sync of the Japanese original. I don't know if it was pre rendered as in an actual video played or in game cut scene, if it was cut scene, they could have tweaked it for localisation instead of giving us something that would have Shatner going "Dude WTF?"

I don't know if it was down to the translation or a script change that just used the images on screen as a rough idea of what the new plot should be, but a few times I encountered a character moving their mouth a lot and just "Yes" coming out, or just as bizarre a speech with almost ventriloquist delivery.

[fireheart17]

Speaking of that, I think that's what happened with FFX. There'd be a delay with Rikku's voice and actions.

There's also a REALLY old game that WAS rendered in English, but on my ancient dinosaur of a computer (at the time), there was always a full delay between the sound and the video of about a minute for one or two scenes. (Nancy Drew Stay Tuned For Danger the scene in question is around 7 minutes)

[Sarah Valentine]

I always prefer subtitles over dub voices, the original voices just seem to fit better.

[anakhouri]

I don't mind dubbed animation as long as it is well done, such as Disney's releases of the Studio Ghibli movies and Funimation's stuff.

I have a hard time with dubbed live-action though (excepting old kung fu films where it's actually part of the charm). I think it might be because I have already seen a lot of subbed foreign films, so for example I already know what Chow Yun Fat sounds like, and it's weird to hear a different voice coming from his mouth.

[Nekojin]

I'm one of them olllld fogeys who got into anime before it became a huge trend here in the US. I watched Robotech during its first run here in the US, I bought tapes with raw episodes of Ranma 1/2 the week after it aired in Japan (along with other shows that aired right before and right after it, like Oishinbo and Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro).

I considered subs superior to dubs for years, for many of the reasons that have already been given. However, when I was living in Las Vegas, I had a roommate who was unable to read subtitles because she was slightly dyslexic, so she wasn't able to enjoy the shows. Since I wanted to be inclusive, I started buying the dubs instead.

Since then, I've found other reasons to watch shows using dubs - namely, you can do other things besides just watching the show. When you're watching a show with subs, you have to devote your full attention or you miss dialogue. With a dub, you can split your attention somewhat.

I still prefer subtitles to dubs, but it's not as much of an absolute, these days. Unless the dub is terrible, anyway. We particularly enjoy watching with English subs and English dub track, if the dub is good enough, so that we can laugh at the differences between the two. =^_^=

[Andara Bledin]

I don't have a strict preference either way, except for the fact that when subbing, companies tend to render a more faithful translation than when dubbing.

We often watch our anime in English with subtitles on, and it's sometimes amusing to catch where the words being said and the words on the screen don't match up. The most egregious example of this is in Bakuretsu Hunters (Sorcerer Hunters) in a scene where Carrot is crawling across a bridge. In the Japanese edit, it's absolutely silent for a couple of minutes. In the English edit, however, they gave him a running monologue for the entire bit, as if we couldn't handle the idea of silence in a sneaking scene.

Sometimes, however, the English voice actors are so horrible that we'll swap over to the Japanese track, and then I'll just twitch every time they don't translate easily-recognized words and phrases properly for the sub, such as "nakama," "senpai," and "oneesan/oneekun" and "oniisan/oniichan." Actually, nakama is one of my hot-button words because it has such a weight for the characters, and the translation usually misses that entirely.

[HYHYBT]

Since then, I've found other reasons to watch shows using dubs - namely, you can do other things besides just watching the show.

Pretty well what I was going to say. If I'm really watching something, I hardly notice reading subtitles, but it makes the program worthless as something to have on while doing anything else.