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.
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.
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.
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AFAIK about Jp movie subs:
- Some Hollywood AAA type of movie won’t give actuql media to avoid leaks and/or very tight deadline. I don’t know if this still holds true, but past movie subtitles definitely had this issue.
- Multimedia translation follows “4 letters/sec” guideline, based on average reading comprehension while following movie, which can cut down a lot of subtleties.
- On DVD or other budget-tight medium often people do subtitles for their professional training so the quality may vary.
Edit: I checked the JP translator of Clear and Present Danger - it’s Natsuko Toda. She had controversies in 80-00s movie translation because of lots of sloppy mistakes, ignoring background/references and making up unnatural phrases. LOTR (fellowship of the ring) even had subtitle revisions in DVD release, but she’s fast and prolofic so lots of Hollywood major movies at that time had her subtitle. I assure other translators take more time and have better quality (but it maybe hard to avoid her for older movies).
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.
Depends. We rarely use subtitles (most content is lip synced), but when something is shown as “original with subtitles” it very much depends on the company or team that did it. Some are surprizingly good, some are outright horrible. I can imagine that the available budget plays an important role here.
Depends a lot of each movie or show.
Anyway the worst are always translations from japanese. Maybe it’s a language especially difficult to translate, idk.
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.
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.
A friend of mine used to translate subtitles as a part time job while being a student and I can assure you that he wasn’t paid anywhere close enough to waste any time at all on looking up anything he didn’t readily know.
Yeah, bad pay leads to shitty work and workers who don’t care about how shitty their work is. How did that old Soviet joke go, “they pretend to pay, we pretend to work.” Something like that.
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?
French subs are often good
I hate subtitles in any language. They’re ugly, distracting, you have to look at them to read them so you by default miss the actors performance and they often ruin comedic timing by showing the punchline in print or spoil mysteries in the same way. I won’t watch anything with subtitles on
I use them to confirm what I thought I heard the actor mumble. Without subtitles, I need to rewind and turn the volume up and even then I can’t always make out what was said. I watch in VLC and make them small at the bottom so they don’t distract, but are there when I want them.
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Luckily Spanish is generally pretty well subtitled and dubbed. My pet peeve issue is that oftentimes there’s only Latin Spanish, instead of Spain Spanish. You’d think that each Latin country would have it’s own dialect so having just Latin Spanish would be reductionist, but alas.
It’s annoying when I want to script auto subtitle selection and I don’t properly account for Latin Spanish, sometimes it picks that and it’s horrible, almost like reading a different language.
Luckily Spanish is generally pretty well subtitled and dubbed. My pet peeve issue is that oftentimes there’s only Latin Spanish, instead of Spain Spanish. You’d think that each Latin country would have it’s own dialect so having just Latin Spanish would be reductionist, but alas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Spanish
In any event, in the sphere of spoken language, the issue has become problematic since at least the 1950s when the commercial demands on movie dubbing studios working with Hollywood films began to call for the development of a Spanish whose pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammatical features would not be recognizable as belonging to any particular country (español latino or español neutro, “Latin American Spanish” or “Neutral Spanish”). This goal soon proved to be an elusive one: even if the results could, on occasion, approximate a universally intelligible form, at the same time the process prevented the transmission of a familiar, intimate, or everyday tone. Disney Pictures took an early interest in unified dubbing. Three Little Pigs was dubbed in Paris by Castilian and French-accented actors. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio were dubbed in Argentina under Luis César Amadori. Later Disney films were dubbed in Mexico under Edmundo Santos.[44] Nevertheless, its continued use has produced a degree of familiarization with a certain abstract phonetics throughout Spanish America. Dubbings made in Spain, are very particularly localized due to both the language politics of Francoist Spain and later assumptions by Spanish audiences. As Disney has re-issued its productions in newer media or to establish new copyrights, it has increased the number of dialectal versions. Sometimes this has backfired: parents who had watched The Little Mermaid with a pan-Hispanic dubbing disliked the re-dubbed Peninsular Spanish dubbing.[44]
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.
I feel like this was true in the 90s and 00s, but since the advent of really big movies like Marvel, cinemas are less stingy with subtitles. Small ones may only do dubs, but in big cities, you’ll find places that always have subs. I don’t think I’ve ever noticed any egregious translation shitshow in the subs - maybe precisely because the industry is already used to actually translating something you could say in French. At most, back in the 90s you would always get attempts at heavily localized expressions that verge on cultural erasure (Thanksgivings episodes were always “family reunion”), not so much blatant nonsense, but now we’re more comfortable with just doing proper translations. Unless the publisher just doesn’t care to put any money in this show.
I’ve no idea what the state of subbed TV shows is right now, though. I’m sure TV still prefers to air dubs, but the relevant channels have the option of switching between subbed and dubbed, and then there was the whole DVD/BR industry that still always had subs, and AFAIK that has always worked well. Like, maybe 30 years ago your favorite show had DVDs with no English track, dub only, but that shit stopped. I’m not sure how that industry has been doing in the recent years of streaming taking over, and I don’t even know if streaming services in France have sub options or dub only…
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
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.
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.
