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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

I agree. That said, my wife subtitles every movie which normally I don't care about, except the subtitles are -wrong-. I don't know why they do that, it seems rather innocent, but drives me crazy as an English speaker. It's usually something not even so consequential..off the top of my head like replacing 'Time for dinner' with 'Time for supper'. Not an exact example, but it's usually along these lines.

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It was said in a major Dutch newspaper last year that Netflix seriously underpays/over pressures the translators:

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2019/06/07/ondertitelaars-voelen-z...

Basically in “the good old days” translating/subtitling was a serious job for serious money. But it has been turned into almost a “work from home, gig economy Mechanical Turk” thing.

And the quality obviously suffers.

I won't even try the shows whose trailers have the problem stated in this thread.

It's blatantly obvious 3 seconds in. Very unprofessional.

That drives me crazy too! Some shows are pretty faithful, but others are way off. The otherwise-wonderful Cuatro Estaciones en la Habana is especially bad -- it replaces all the local Cuban slang w/ standard Spanish, e.g., they'll subtitle imbécil when the dialog is comemierda. Why would you do that?!

Also strongly agree w/ GP; in my experience, you've got to hide the english to learn anything. Otherwise your brain isn't working in the target language.

Are the shows you're watching dubbed?

Was recently watching How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast), which is a German show originally, and the subtitles were off in a similar way. Drove me nuts!

I ended up switching the audio language to German and watching it with English subtitles, was a miles better experience for me.

Nope, original English shows. What's frustrating is that my wife uses subtitles for learning how words are spelled, but the words spoken aren't the same as the ones written!

From what I've heard, when dubbing shows they normally adapt the translations for the dub to fit better with the character's mouth movements and to make it more 'idiomatic' in the target language, but the subtitles keep the literal translation. It would be interesting to learn why, I find it drives me crazy as well.

Semi-synced dubs are an early example of uncanny valley

This has been an issue with Netflix for years. It's almost as if the translators of movie or TV series don't have access to the videos themselves because every other sentence is slightly wrong.

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