Comment by the_af | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_af | Hacker News Reader

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Same. I don't understand why people want (them and their kids) to be isolated from other cultures. If you're watching a movie set in Japan, India or China, have it be about their culture. If there's something you or your kids don't understand, make an effort to learn about it (and the green peas thing seems trivial to understand).

Netflix also does something absurd with their subtitles. I was watching "The Empress" (which is set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire) with German language and English subtitles. I like listening to the real actors' voices, and learning the sounds and cadence of the language. So the characters speak in Italian for a while (subtitles say "[speaking in Italian]", and when they switch back to German the subtitles clarify.. "[in English]". The fuck, Netflix? Surely the viewer of this show understands they didn't speak in English in the Austro-Hungarian empire, so why write it's English? What the hell is Netflix even trying to achieve here? Seems robotic: "us = English speakers, therefore everyone's default must be English"?

Just saying "Pixar movies" was probably not a great example. They can be deliberately location ambiguous (Monsters Inc., Toy Story - though it's clearly _somewhere_ in America, The Incredibles - a generic "metropolis"/50's futuristic city, lightyear, Elemental) or very specifically somewhere (cars - mashup of Route 66 towns, Finding Nemo - Sydney when on land, Ratatouille - Paris, etc...)

It makes sense to "translate" locale cultural indicators in say Wall·E which was very location agnostic but not so much for say Turning red which is very culturally specific.

Good point.

The localization of The Incredibles in Argentina was embarrassing, though someone must have thought it was a good idea. They used local voice actors popular at the time (though not so much today) with strong porteño (Buenos Aires') accents. They also referred to the streets with Argentinian names, e.g. "let's turn that corner of Corrientes Avenue!". The problem is that Corrientes Av is very typical of Buenos Aires, but nothing on screen looked anywhere close to it, so the whole thing was ridiculous and embarrassing, sort of like if the characters pretended they were in Tokyo and were Japanese.

What if they had gone the extra mile (maybe possible in the near future) and reskinned every character to look more Argentinian, and rethemed the city to look more like Buenos Aires, would I have been happier? Certainly not -- I want to see the original movie as intended, not some sanitized version designed to make me feel "at home" and not challenge me in the slightest.

(I watched the movie in English as well, mind you).

Could that Netflix subtitle thing have been a one-off error? I don't think I've ever encountered such a mismatch before.

It did remind me of watching "The Beast" (La Bête)[0] in the original French with subtitles and I was then surprised when I saw the subtitles say "[In English]" and I was, "Oh, damn, the characters did actually switch to English".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beast_(2023_film)

It's consistent through The Empress, I just gave an example. But maybe it's a decision specifically for this show?

For example, when Elisabeth is practicing several languages, each is subtitled "[in $language]", but when she switches back to German the subtitles readily explain... "[in English]". This confused the hell out of me!

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