When you are reading subtitles, you are putting less focus on the visual compositions. And your attention is often focused down towards the bottom of the screen. Not to mention that the subs themselves are blocking part of the composition.

And for some films, which have a lot of talking, reading subtitles can seriously detract from watching the movie. Unfortunately, such static talking-oriented films (ie Rohmer's Tale of Spring, which I just watched) are also the ones where you'll notice poor lip-syncing with dubbing.

I'm not a big advocate of dubbing. Just find it odd how entrenched subbing is, and people seem to gloss over the problems of subbing because it is familiar and comfortable.

Lissa, I think you missed my point about "literal" translation. It's just a matter of how faithful the translation wants/needs to be to the original language. An example: in a faculty meeting in The Class, one teacher says something which was subbed as "giving the students freebies". And since the word "freebies" seemed such American slang, I wondered what the French really said. The dubbing had "give them Christmas presents." Listening again, I could hear that the French used some variant on "Noel" (however spelled/pronounced in French).
Here, the dubbing was more of a literal translation, though it easily could have been the reverse.

I assume that the subtitle translators wanted to catch the sense of informality and the everyday style of speech, so went with an Americanism.
For my part, I preferred in this instance knowing more what was actually said in French. Which is probably my general preference.

Actually, it'd be nice if Dvd's could provide more than one English subtitle option. I've gotten this on rare occasions, and it's helpful to compare, or to choose the one you prefer.

Dubbing and subtitling are distinct skills. With a dub, you generally want about the same length of dialogue and hopefully you can fit it to the mouth shapes reasonably well. Subtitling often requires a condensation, as we read slower than we talk. I think both dubbing and subbing are free to choose between literal translation and getting the sense/feel of the language -- or some middle perch in between.

The worst thing about dubbing, for me, is that I recognize the voices from the soft-core porno that played on cable in my teens. When you're watcing a Bergman metaphysical drama, it can be really distracting.