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.
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.