A. I doubt the policies in place have nothing to do with people’s preferences.
B. I see you haven’t met the delightful “I DOn’t want to HEar thoSE stupid LANGUAGes, my LANguage is the best!!!111!!!” crowd. You’re fortunate.
I’m pretty sure your usual research skills will show you that, indeed, people tend to consider subs an inconvenience, by their own free will. 
When you only have one choice, that choice is the best by default 
To be honest there are few things that I can think off where the dubbing company actually made the effort to create something equally or even better than the original. The best example is the Greek “Inspector Gadget” opening I put in Napster’s thread which is a work of art and objectively more intricate than the original intro. (better or not, that is a matter of taste)
Meanwhile, for Count Duckula, you really cannot top that awesome intro, so they had to sub it:
If anyone has the Count Duckula intro subbed in any language, I want to watch it 
I love that intro (and the outro) of those series and I’d like to see what effort was made.
Looking up “sub vs dub”, sub wins in everything I found (mostly links about anime preferences on sub or dub, but hey)
That’s niche, we’re talking general population here.
I like hearing the original language, and sometimes I watch something with subtitles, but I actually hate having to focus on the subtitles all the time. So most of the time, I prefer dubbing (when I don’t understand the original language), even though it does definitely take away a lot of the original version’s atmosphere.
When I watch something that’s originally in English, of course I watch it in English and not with German dubbing. Sometimes I make an exception when I have a hard time understanding what is being said, or if it’s just less trouble to watch the German version for whatever reason.
That is definitely true and imho the main reason why everyone from Scandinavia speaks English so much better than everyone in the “dubbing part of Europe” (see Gia’s link).
Growing up in Germany, it was of course comfortable to have everything dubbed in my language, but I am sure it made it harder to learn English.
I confess I usually leave subs on, for American series for example, it’s a habit I guess (and it helps when they have incredibly heavy accents, for example some characters in Justified).
And obviously when I want to watch something but I can’t raise the volume or wear headphones for whatever reason. I guess I’ve developed sneaky habits. 
that’s why pirates in Russia create voice-over versions of translation even after official dub was released.
So you get original atmosphere and don’t have to focus on subtitles
On English TV you can often see the “pseudo-pejorative” subtitle, translating into Real English what is said by, say, Scots, Australians, and Irishers.
Honestly, I hate voice-over dubbing. You can’t really hear what is said in the original language, and there is often only one person doing the voice-over, which makes it sound weird, imho. Maybe it can be done in a good way, I don’t know, but the examples I’ve seen (in Polish) were just bad.
One of my pet peeves is unnatural dubbing. Take the film Gladiator and pretend for a moment that it was an American dub of an original Latin show. There should either be consistent accent, ie. just American; or there should be different accents of English to reflect the local area, eg. a southern accent for the Hispanians and a northern one for the city folk of Rome itself; or individual characters can have accents that make sense, eg. a Greek slave with a Greek accent. But in the film the accents are drawn spottily from across the USA and even England, it seemed. At one point a landlord appears with a strong Irish accent. Sure, it could be argued that he represents a Romano-Celtic immigrant from Britannia, but it was so unnecessary and threw my immersion.
By means of comparison, Barbarians does an excellent job of conveying regional accent and idiom, all the more impressively in Latin itself.
I hate full dubbing. I hate when English/German/Japanese laugh is replaced with Russian laugh. Or when villagers with bad education and accent in original talk without accent and clearly in Russian.
if you could understand what is said, you wouldn’t use translations
so hearing “melody” of original speech is enough, words you wouldn’t understand anyway
there are many unofficial voice-over groups in Russian. And my current opinion is - it should be as simple as possible. So brain ignores “melody” of translation and comprehends original “melody” much more deeply.
I’ve heard that when they dubbed the Terminator movies into German, Schwarzenegger was not allowed to provide the voice work for his own character since his accent is distinctly Austrian, and perhaps a bit too rural, which would sound odd for a futuristic killing machine.
Apparently, they even poked fun at this in a deleted scene from the third movie.
Das kenne ich! Sometimes they even voice-over my people.
If you know the original language well enough to recognise differences in accent and education level, you probably don’t need the voice-over. But I agree, lots of the originial atmosphere is lost in full-dubbing.
Which syllable is stressed in the verb revel?
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And which is stressed in the name of the mystery chocolate snack Revels?
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What does the name of the chocolate snack represent?
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Hmm, Wiktionary says that I’m wrong about this verb stress…
How should Arabic al (“the”) be Romanised?
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…plus, I think it’s important to romanize the actual sound and not the letter, so that people who don’t know Arabic get an idea how to pronounce it correctly. For example “ash-shams” and not “al-shams”, or “an-nour” and not “al-nour”.
Edit: Here’s a Wikipedia article for everyone who has no idea what I’m talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_and_moon_letters
Thanks for educating me :D
How do you pronounce the ae in English larvae?
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