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Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

This is a tangent, but has any noticed just how terrible Netflix subtitles can be? Occasionally, when watching with family members, I will enable Swedish subtitles for English movies and sometimes it's as if they have worked on a different material than what the actors on screen are saying. It's bizarre to see this low quality effort in movie after movie, show after show.

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Yes! The subtitles can be completely different than the dubbing in some cases which makes it difficult for me to watch with both.

Also, they sometime use a bit odd translations. I saw a Belgian show and they translated smoking a cigarette into smoking a fag. Which I guess is technically correct (based on the cambridge dictionary), just an odd choice for general EU viewership

Yes! The subtitles can be completely different than the dubbing in some cases which makes it difficult for me to watch with both.

I suspect in many cases the subbing is done translating off the original script, while the dubbing is done using a completely different translation designed to flow better when spoken.

Dub-oriented translations are also designed to "look natural" when coupled with the actor's lip movements.

To make matters worse, sometimes shows are re-dubbed [0], but may retain the subtitles that were accurate to the previous dub.

[0]: For instance, Neon Genesis Evangelion was released on the Italian Netflix with a brand-new dub, which caused quite a commotion: https://comicbook.com/anime/news/neon-genesis-evangelion-net...

This seems to be the case. Watching the Spanish dubbed version of Community on Hulu, the dubs have the study group taking an English class, while the subs have them in a Spanish class as in the original.

Side note: in the dubbed version, it's hilarious when they switch to speaking bad English where they would have switched to bad Spanish in the original.

> Yes! The subtitles can be completely different than the dubbing in some cases which makes it difficult for me to watch with both.

Yeah I've tried Czech dubbing with Czech subtitles, but have a lot of trouble following it for this reason. I'm sure once I get better at Czech it'll make more sense, but for the moment it seems like I need to stick with Czech audio and English subtitles or vice versa. Otherwise it's just too confusing.

If you can access the videos on česká televize (presumably you're based here if you are learning Czech) I've found them to be quite useful as they generally provide an option to turn on subtitles that match the audio. Like this kids show I used to watch with my teacher in our lessons: https://decko.ceskatelevize.cz/chaloupka-na-vrsku :D

Thank you very much! I do watch things on česká televize, but I will definitely check out that kids show!

And no not based there, but I do have a VPN so it's all good. Thanks again!

I also liked “Anča a Pepik” - a show about two mice who solve mysteries :-D Hodně štěstí!

That's amazing that you're studying Czech. It's a very difficult language, so kudos.

I don't know if I'd call it "amazing", but yes it is pretty difficult for me. :)

I'm generally pretty good at languages, but all languages I speak and have experience in are either Germanic or Romance. Learning Czech is cool because it is a little related (it is an Indo-European language and you can definitely see that if you pay attention), but different enough that it is really pretty difficult. I'm having a lot of fun with it. Hopefully I'll be able to spend a longer period of time there so I can be more immersed in it.

Basically, only English has a tradition where in closed captions, the spoken word matches the text. In many other languages, even for original content, even for subtitles that are a hearing aid, the text often won’t match. For example in French.

I guess the desire is to shorten the text to make it easier to read in time, but it’s kind of ironic that it’s called „subtitles for the ones with bad hearing“. Non-matching subtitles are not a hearing aid, but a hearing replacement.

I've only ever seen this when something was dubbed, not when the original content language matches the subtitle language. Do you have any examples?

In Frech, Dubbed content is what one often used for learning, because it’s content one already knows (for example I always wanted to use star trek shows for learning frech cuz i know them in and out, but can’t find a dub with matching subs).

Then again, on Netflix even some of the original language content has shortened subtitles.

I have never found Asterix (the animated movies) with proper closed captioning.

The LLwN catalogue of good subbed French content does list an Astrix movie, perhaps that one does have good subs?

https://languagelearningwithnetflix.com/catalogue.html#langu...

I can’t believe that - subtitles don’t match the spoken word outside of English? Isn’t that extremely jarring if it’s the same language?

I think it is because the speed which subtitles need to be shown at if it would be word for word. It would be too fast for many viewers. Usually (I am talking from a Swedish context), they are a 60-75% summary of what is being said.

Super common in French, and was a big hurdle in learning the language through movies/ TV.

I don’t want to put English subtitles, but sometimes I have trouble with accents. My best guess why would be that they are translated independently and at different times by different people. Some shows almost every single line is different.

Yes

They traditionally had trained translators, a friend worked for them. He's since been let go, with no warning about quality being an issue, leaving me to believe they have replaced him with machines or cheaper workers. I also watch with subtitles and notice the decline.

I was under the impression that most of the English -> English subtitles are just machine generated. So often the subtitles will be homophonic to what was actually said, a mistake that a human would not have made. And then what's worse is you get [Speaking German] or whatever, so I have to pause, disable the subtitles and rewind, just to be able to see the original subtitle that was included for the vitally important to the plot translation of the foreign language.

I've tried watching dubbed+subbed shows, with both set to my target language, and the two rarely ever match for any given line of dialogue. Netflix has thankfully expanded their language capabilities recently to make it easier to watch shows in an arbitrary language (used to have to change the entire interface into the target language), but I wish there were a CC option for all choices of audio.

This is because the subtiters and dubbers usually work independently and face different constraints.

The key is to find content that was originally produced in the language you want to learn so that the subtitles will match.

I don't think this is specific to Netflix, Swedish subtitles are routinely awful and badly translated across a variety of media.

For non-major-languages subtitles, they use (mostly) machine translation. For major languages, they use people.

Which is weird because it seems like the perfect use of crowd sourced knowledge. You could probably get translations just by offering free subscriptions. I think you'd see a bit of national pride help fuel it too: I'd love to see regional variations/dialects. (For instance, Quebec French). You could even have crowd verification like what Google Translate and Duolingo do.

Wouldn't it be a mess? 'Reddit translates Netflix'? I see what your saying about 'crowd verification', but how do you filter out 'upvoted for lolz'?

There are things you could do of course, I just don't think it's trivial.

Businesses to operate at scale generally require more reliable pipelines. And who is going to check the crowd-sourced translations then? What about a TikTok-like trolling exercise like the one who was done for Trump's rally?

I've definitely noticed some pretty bad mistranslations in Netflix subtitles but not worse than general movie subtitles.

I feel Netflix's subtitle quality is slightly better than average for Japanese.

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