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.

deleted by creator

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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 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.