For example, whenever I watch an American movie with Japanese subtitles: the translation kind of sucks since there are words translated literally word by word making zero sense or lack of taking account of visual context from a scene. Depends on who translated the dialog, it could be that translators didn’t watch the movie or understand the context in specific scenes.
I recall watching Clear & Present Danger (Harrison Ford) with JP sub, there was a piece of dialog where the commander of a special forces unit gave the orders on planting explosives in which he ordered them to “cook it” basically implying on detonating the trigger but the subtitles translated this as 料理しろ which is incorrect when you account the scene’s context.
Whether you speak German, French, Spanish or etc. are the translated subtitles crap when it comes to movies where colloquialisms (slang), jokes (humor) or wordplay (puns) are thrown into the mix while listening to the original English dub? It’s because subtitles only convey a message but can miss nuances from spoken dialog via the source language.
deleted by creator
Depends. I’d say most of them are fine but the issues come when there’s something niche, like technical stuff, local slang words or dialect etc.
I’m a (ex) car mechanic, my dad likes to watch Wheeler Dealers. Quite often I’m visiting when that show is on and so many of the technical terms used are translated completely stupidly. “Brake horsepower” has been translated to “bruttohevosvoima” which means “gross (as in economics) horsepower.” Alternator has been translated to “vaihtaja” which means “changer/switcher.”
There was a Top Gear episode where Clarkson said “a bit squirrely under braking” I understand that as “a bit restless when braking hard” but that was translated to “orava jarrutus” which means “squirrel braking.”
I have more such examples but I’ve forgotten most of them, its been a long while since I’ve watched traditional TV, I mostly download stuff and if I use subtitles (because of audio these days is messed up on purpose), I use English subtitles.
Like what I wrote in the thread: I was watching a Harrison Ford movie with Japanese subtitles and they translated “cook it” (as in “press the detonator”) said by a military commander during a certain scene leading up to an action sequence (special forces were about to raid a cartel compound in Colombia) literally as 料理しろ which literally means “Let’s cook” (like in cooking food at a kitchen) which sounds completely stupid when you take visual context into account. Subtitles can suck, even in Finnish for example since it’s a different language from English.
I don’t mind too much those translation errors that come from things like slang or figure of speech types of things, like “cook it” etc. But when theres a technical word that you could easily look up, its insane to me that the translator decides to just guess what it might be.
My favorite silly translation “error” was when the “The Song Remains The Same” Led Zeppelin film was translated to “Laulu Jää Pystyyn” - “the song stays standing up.” Like why would you even translate that? Its literally a song name, just keep it in the original English. But even further, why would you translate it that way? Why not use “laulu pysyy samana” which would be a direct translation of the song title. I would guess that who ever translated it was old and unfamiliar with Led Zeppelin songs, or something like that. But at least it gave us something to laugh at. And a Finnish band Eppu Normaali did release their own concert film with the title “Laulu Jää Pystyyn.” So that was something.
Speaking of that, there was another scene from that movie I’ve mentioned where Harrison Ford’s character was reading through government files and one of them had the subheading Infantry Battalion as it was about the possibility of sending boots on the ground, which again in Japanese was translated as 歩兵小隊 (Infantry Platoon) when the correct word is in fact 大隊 (Battalion) as a platoon is smaller than a battalion. How does the translator not know the difference between the two?
It’s the same with military ranks as well: like I was watching an episode of 24, there was a scene where Jack Bauer contacts a surviving sailor on the submarine as the CTU were about to stop terrorists from deploying nukes. The sailor had a petty officer rank which was subtitled as 軍曹 (sergeant, in the army) when he’s in the navy! It should’ve been subtitled as 兵曹長, like the how does the translator not know the difference between a sergeant & petty officer?
Yeah, technical terms can be a bitch to translate when the translator isn’t experienced.
Yeah its stuff like that that bother me, things that would take 30 seconds to figure out with a basic internet search or reading a few lines of a Wikipedia article. I mean one mistake is not too bad, but if they keep happening, its clear that who ever translated it is not very professional.
No wonder AI is taking their jobs. Sadly.
It’s either AI conquering their position or an inexperienced human translator who probably hasn’t seen the film they’re translating, one of the two. Consistency is also key, since characters may use that term multiple times in the movie at different intervals, so maintaining the same correct translation is vital to avoid confusion.
However, what happens is that there are different word choices for the same term. For example, in Japanese there’s two words that mean “weapon” in English but have different connotations:
- 兵器 (ordnance, as in military hardware) - think of tanks, missiles, nukes
- 武器 (arms, think of sidearms or rifles) - basically a weapon you can use
The issue is that when watching a war film with subs, they get used interchangeably when that’s not correct, despite both words having the same definition: what matters is context. There was a scene in one war epic where the soldier said to the enemy “drop your weapons!” (武器を捨てろ) but the subs used the wrong variant 兵器 when the enemy is only armed with a normal rifle.
I mean, are there words in Finnish despite having the same meaning or translation in English: they are used differently based on a associated context and can subtitles still get it wrong?
I watched Project Hail Mary with German subtitles the other day and sometimes the subtitles were funnier than the English. Kudos to the translator who wrote those.
Generally the subtitles here used to be exceptionally good, but nowadays the quality varies wildly. The broadcast companies used to have their own in-house experts who did the translations extremely well, translating even the proverbs and cultural idioms to a form that made perfect sense in the context. Those old school translators were highly respected.
But then the companies started skimming money off everything to increase their profits and started buying the translations from the cheapest provider, which led to the drastic drop of quality consistency.
I learned English by watching subtitled films and series since I was 4, we had a VHS-system which I used extensively. At the time there was very little domestic production aimed for children and almost 100% of imported material was subtitled, so that kids would have an extra incentive to learn how to read. I remember that the Disney films my friends had were always dubbed, but my parents considered them too expensive to buy.
My kids are now in the lower grades of elementary school and I’ve watched a lot of new subtitled films with them. The translations aren’t downright bad, but they are clearly “lazy”. If there is something difficult to translate directly, mostly they just skip it if it’s not important to the plot. And many of them are done by only listening to the audio track, missing the visual cues that would indicate the correct meaning of the words. As in use of “a drill” as a tool, when it should be about a training excersize.
Native Spanish speaker, usually subtitles are pretty good as long as made by humans and not auto generated captions. I guess that’s a standard in any language though. Personally I can’t recall bad subtitles ever, but very occasionally I do find simplified subtitles or phrases made in a way that could be much closer to the original in structure. But it’s negligible.
Yea there is a lot of bad translations out there including movie subtitles. Here in Switzerland they usually have double subtitles in the cinema if you want to watch the original dub. So you can be annoyed at both the French and German translations at the same time.
Games and Websites tend to be worse though. Yesterday I followed a link to a Heise article, and linked was the English version. It was genuinley hard to grasph in some paragraphs. Switching to German made it much clearer. Not because I understand German better, my grasp of English is good. It was because the English writing was just bad, and didn’t convey the original intent of the German version.
Most often it’s not that the translations are wrong in content, but just contain very unnatural use of the target language.
I can get good quality subtitles for most movies in my language. The best comes from cinema enthusiasts that put in the effort to make superb quality subtitles, even for obscure movies.
Nowadays, if I’m stupid enough to be watching television, it’s easy to spot machine-generated subtitles, due to poor quality. And dubbing is also on the rise. I’ve followed the same series fora few episodes, first in the original language with subtitles, then dubbed, and it was like watching two completely different shows.
Being multilingual and watching American content translated to Spanish is rough. A lot of idioms just don’t translate well but it’s almost as if those interpreting/translating aren’t even trying to sound natural.
My wife, native of Mexico won’t even watch them in Spanish now that she’s pretty fluent in English.
One of the benefits of speaking a less popular language is that subtitles (downloaded separately since they’re rarely offered as a built-in option) are usually pretty accurate since they are submitted by a handful of native speakers instead of run through translation software. It’s not perfect all the time, but certainly understandable.
Semi-related, I used to translate song lyrics on lyricstranslate.com and would add context in a footnote for parts where a literal translation would not work well. It was annoying when users would submit translations that were obviously run through Google Translate and without any nuance or explanation.
French subs are often good
I’ve seen some French movies with English subtitles getting things wrong. As well as whatever other problems happen, sometimes it seems obvious that they’re going by what was written in the script and not what was said in the film.
Quite often the script is used for subtitles because it’s easier than transcribing those differences. All of the text is already there in a seasily readable for mat both for humans and machines to source that translation from.
I’m mainly talking about the reverse (English movies with French subtitles) as mentioned on the main thread, but can that also be wrong? Like for example, you can watch a movie set in the American South (full of it’s own slang) spoken in US English and won’t be translated well in French.
The French don’t do subtitles, they dub everything.
It’s horrible.
Luckily movie theatres in Switzerland and Belgium regularly show foreign movies with original soundtrack and French subtitles for all who prefer it that way.
Belgium shows films with TWO subtitle tracks though. Dutch and French. Takes up like half the screen 🫠
For sure. Being a native English speaker, it’s worth paying a little extra to go to the cinema in Switzerland for me.
No wonder why English proficiency in France is bad despite being the most visited country.
English proficiency in France is bad
My guess is that it’s because French is comparatively-widely-spoken relative to most other languages in Europe.
The benefits of speaking a language increase the more people who can speak it — it gives you access to more people out there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers
According to this, as of 2026, there are about 1,493 million people in the world who can speak English.
There are about 334 million people in the world who can speak French. That’s second only to Spanish among European languages behind English.
So if you already know French, learning English will give you access to something like 4.4 times as many people as you could otherwise communicate with.
Contrast that with, say, Icelandic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_language
Icelandic or Icelandish (/aɪsˈlændɪk/ ⓘ eyess-LAN-dik, /aɪsˈlændɪʃ/ eyess-LAN-dish; endonym: íslenska, pronounced [ˈi(ː)stlɛnska] ⓘ, íslensk tunga [ˈi(ː)stlɛnsk ˈtʰuŋka]) is a North Germanic language from the Indo-European language family spoken by about 390,000 people, the vast majority of whom live in Iceland, where it is the national language.[2]
An Icelandic speaker picking up English gives them access to about 3,828 times as many people. That’s a a lot more content you have access to, people you can communicate with, etc. The payoff to an Icelandic speaker from picking up and using English is considerably larger than the payoff to a French speaker; they’ve got more incentive to be able to use it well.
Imo, it’s a combination of that, and really outdated teaching methods.
La Francophonie is large enough that people never need another language to access additional information. They even have their own pronunciations for Anglophone celebrities, which is bizarre at first.
I once had a conversation in a bar where people were talking about a famous musician named ‘Kenny West.’ My friends were astonished that I had never heard of him. It took me like 5 minutes to realise that they were talking about Kanye West…
Like I mean come on, he says his own name constantly in his own songs…
Like that episode of Seinfeld with the guy who always refers to himself in the third person
My experience is that most subtitles in most languages are all generally rather poor and I haven’t really encountered any general quality differences between different languages, but quite noticable quality differences between different kinds of publishers.
Perhaps not surprising, some of the best subtitles I’ve ever read have been fansubs published for free by enthusiasts on the internet, people who care deeply about the material they’re subtitling and spend much more time on getting everything just right than what anyone would ever pay for. But of course the worst subtitles I’ve ever read have also been random finds on the internet.
Big public service broadcasters tend to have solid subtitles in my experience, not perfect, of course, but almost always on a serious level.
Netflix not so much. I’ve regularly encountered some seriously questionable subtitles across languages there. (On the other hand, they’re rather great at always providing subtitles, in lots of different languages.)
But cheap DVDs take the prize, that’s where you consistently find the bottom of the barrel, all the way from from simply confusing to hilariously absurd.
Subtitles isn’t only relating to dialog, but visual context (when you see a character doing something, the translation should also match their actions).
Whether you speak German, French, Spanish or etc. are the translated subtitles crap when it comes to movies where colloquialisms (slang), jokes (humor) or wordplay (puns) are thrown into the mix while listening to the original English dub?
For German, the question is hardly relevant.
The audience expects and gets a good German audio track. Nobody cares for subtitles.
Such minor things as colloquialisms, jokes etc. are translated with medium acceptable quality, that is, most times at least far from crap. Wordplay usually isn’t translateable, of course, but sometimes replaced with other kinds of jokes, so you think you know why they laugh or grin there.
Germans and Brazilians are one of a kind, apparently.
Why read a subtitle if you can just dub over the original?
I had to go the extra mile to find “Die Welle” in original format and matching subtitles, to actually get to watch the movie as it was made.
Dubbing is a curse in disguise.
Why read a subtitle
I find reading subtitles distracting. I can’t watch the people during that time.
There is a learning curve.
There is a learning curve.
Not when there is a choice and the other option is the better one 😜
[…] the other choice is better
That’s your choice and point of view.
I enjoy watching a work in it’s most original form, even if I can’t completely or even not at all grasp what is being said, I can still infer emotions from the tone of voice of the actor.
That’s your choice
It may seem so, but it has been this way in my country all my life, and all the time before, since there were movies in foreign language. I hardly ever had the choice (only in the few years now since the internet has some content with many languages). I have seen very few movies with subtitles (and only some youtube content which is usually terrible either way).
I can still infer emotions from the tone of voice of the actor.
That is a given here, too, because the translated audio gets spoken by actors who have learned their craft or by professional speakers. When the original actor is at least a little well known, then the German speaker usually stays the same for life, and so the actor gets known here with this German voice, and nearly nobody knows the original voice.
My country allowed foreign cinema “only” with subtitles because most of the population was illiterate and the idea was to keep viewership of such media low without resorting to very harsh censorship, although it existed at the time.
It backfired so bad the general population developed a knack for acquiring foreign languages, through those media. Being a latin language country we score very high on the domain of english as a foreign language. Many of us also speak a bit of french and a large majority knows at least how to curse in spanish to return the love.
It was a common recommendation when I was a kid to expose children to non-dubbed media to develop foreingn language and reading skills.
And I can personally vouch for this, as I started developing basic english domain very early through cartoons and movies and the need to follow the subtitles helped me develop my reading skill and speed.
Regarding the quality of dubbing, I can only say something always gets lost in translation. More recently, I’ve followed a couple of series, both subtitled and dubbed, and the end result is completely different. Subtitled, you can follow the emotions in the original actors voices and postures. No lag, no difference, no adaptation. Dubbed, it often feels like watching a completely different show. And the voice over actors are professionals, obviously. But it is common for the voice over team to take some liberties.
Does that explain why Brazilian people are bad at speaking English? Also, there’s no “Th” sound in Portuguese. Don’t tell me, do they dub foreign songs into Portuguese too?
Many brazillians I know have defended that hypothesis. Brazil has a very strong and inwards turned cultural production industry. They cater to themselves and keep 95% of the population satisfied.
I’ve heard a few songs, originally in english, being performed by brazillian artists, with varying degrees of success on the lyrics translation. But most music passes unadultered. Most people only cares about the sound, not the story in a song.
There’s a meme of guy calling a local radio station to request a song. He wanted to hear a song he called “Anteontem fez frio” (literally “yesterday was cold”). No band, no other reference. The DJ asked him to sing a few words, as they did not know such song. He does. It was Queen’s “I want to break free”.
And what is the concern regarding the “th” sound being absent in portuguese?
This is the difference between translating and interpreting.
Tom Scott has a video that touches on this, although the video focused on subtitles not matching dubbing, it’s the same reasons.
Yes, very often. even the SDH subtitles are often wrong. LLM subtitling is generally really bad. I mean yes it gets 95%accurate but in a standard movie that is still a inaccurate word every 20 or so.
LLM subtitling is generally really bad.
All relative. Let’s take an infamous example of human translation from Japanese to English, Zero Wing’s intro:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u5Z-PGJWYU
The Japanese, the original human translation, and what current Google Translate’s LLM gives when I plug in the original text.
Japanese Original human-done English translation Google Translate English translation 西暦2101年 In A.D. 2101 The Year 2101 A.D. 戦いは始まった。 War was beginning. The battle has begun. 艦長：一体どうしたと言んだ？ Captain: What happen? Captain: What on earth is going on?! 機関士：何者かによって、爆発物が仕掛けられたようです。 Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb. Engineer: It appears explosives have been planted—by whom, we don’t know. 通信士：艦長！通信が入りました！ Operator: We get signal. Communications Officer: Captain! We’re receiving a transmission! 艦長：なにっ？ Captain: What ! Captain: What?! 通信士：メインスクリーンにビジョンが来ます。 Operator: Main screen turn on. Communications Officer: Visuals are coming through on the main screen. 艦長：お-お前は！！ Captain: It’s you !! Captain: Y—You!! CATS：おいそがしそうだね、諸君。 CATS: How are you gentlemen !! CATS: You all look rather busy. CATS：連邦政府軍のご協力により、君達の基地は、全てCATSがいただいた。 CATS: All your base are belong to us. CATS: Thanks to the cooperation of the Federal Forces, CATS has successfully seized every last one of your bases. CATS：君達の艦も、そろそろ終わりだろう。 CATS: You are on the way to destruction. CATS: And it seems your ship is about to meet its end as well. 艦長：ば-ばかなっ・・・！ Captain: What you say !! Captain: Im—Impossible…! CATS：君達のご協力には感謝する。せいぜい残り少ない命を、大切にしたまえ・・・・ CATS: You have no chance to survive make your time. CATS: We are grateful for your cooperation. Do try to cherish the precious little life you have left… CATS：ハッハッハッハッハッ ・・・ CATS: Ha ha ha ha … CATS: Hahahaha… 通信士：艦長・・・・ Operator: Captain !! Communications Officer: Captain… 艦長：ZIG全機に発進命令！！ Captain: Take off every ‘ZIG’!! Captain: Order all ZIG units to launch! 艦長：もう彼らに託すしかない・・・ Captain: You know what you doing. Captain: We have no choice now but to entrust everything to them… 艦長：たのむぞ。ZIG！！ Captain: Move ‘ZIG’. Captain: We’re counting on you, ZIG! 艦長：我々の未来に希望を・・・ Captain: For great justice. Captain: Bring hope to our future… I got to the second row thinking ‘this is familiar…’ and then my brain went ‘MAIN SCREEN TURN ON’. Classic.
