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.
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).