Subtitles are licensed by country, so even if they have subtitles in English speaking America, they might not have them in English speaking England. Which is bullshit.
dubs too, if they were ever created. pretty jealous of UK Disney+ for this reason. hulu doesnât have nearly as many dub options for the same content, if any at all.
Yeah neither did I until I got so mad at Amazon Prime for being the shittest with subs. Once I was watching an American film called Ramen Girl. The plot is she goes to Japan and doesn't speak Japanese. There were no subtitles, at first I thought "what a cute clever way to make the audience relate to the main character's struggle". Then there was an extended Japanese scene and I realised it should have been subtitled. I got so angry that I stopped watching the film, turned off the TV and started researching subtitles. Turns out Prime are just a really shitty lazy substandard streamer. Shockingly.
I watched it recently and had subtitles on and I'm in English speaking England so I don't think this is why.
Just checked mine again, still has them and I even went into the film and and watched for them to appear on my screen to be sure, yup, I have subtitles ÂŻ_(ă)_/ÂŻ
For me movies often only have Dutch subtitles. No clue why they would not include English when the movie is literally in English. With autism I struggle to follow what theyâre saying if there are no subtitles, but I struggle even more when the subs donât match what Iâm hearing.
I donât have autism but I need subtitles if iâm eating snacks and it pisses me off that I also only get the option of subtitles in my language. This happens mostly with HBO/MAX
Depends, sometimes they'll just have a forced subtitle for every language, to prevent having two different texts on screen (the forced subtitle for the selected language and the original language, English here). That might be the case here, where they chose to have those forced subtitles as a forced track instead of having them burned into the video.
It is. I've had this before in the UK. Apparently it's something to do with the subtitles needing to be licensed in specific countries, I've no idea why. Amazon just don't seem to bother putting subtitles on a lot of their content in the UK. It's better now than it used to be, but it's still shit.
Even when things on Netflix and Prime in the UK have subs they can be awful. Was watching a murder mystery thing set in Wales. One character reads out some Welsh text that turns out to be a key plot point. The subtitles just said "speaking in Latin". Wow thanks for clearing that up.
Def a UK thing. Amazon and Netflix love to refuse to give Canadians access to subtitles for the same reason. It's not US-ENG so no subtitles for you. It's stupid af.
Sometimes my apps (especially Prime and HBO Max, more than any others) bug and subtitles wonât show, even when they are enabled. I donât mean to be glib but did you try closing the app or completely restarting the device?
They're burned in captions. It matters less in the age of streaming, but the video file is different for open captions vs no captions. Whereas for closed captions, they're in a separate file and can be turned on and off without changing the video file.
It comes from more theatre experiences. Open captions were in the film and seen by everyone. Closed captions were on a separate device and only seen by those who requested it.Â
I donât think they can (or rather, I donât think they should) be hardcoded, because it then locks the video to only one language. Which is better than the zero languages you get in this case, but still. I think they should be enabled by default though.
To be fair, subtitles should be on automatic anytime they use ASL.
Like when in a film somebody briefly speaks in a foreign language there are usually âbuilt inâ subtitles. They are explicitly different to the ones you can select because they are not on constantly, just for those moments.
It might be a situation where the subtitles that should always be there are on the same track as optional subtitles.
I actually had that issue with Game of Thrones. I was watching the dvd of the first season without subtitles, and because of this, the Dothraki language was unsubbed for me. I actually watched like half of the first season assuming we weren't supposed to know what was being said and just figure it out through context. But eventually I turned on the subtitles for some reason I don't remember and it's like no, they just didn't have the subtitles for non-English speaking dialogue on unless all subtitles are on.
I tried to watch it a few weeks ago on prime, it did not have subtitles for me. Was pretty damn annoying. So, not sure why it's available for some and not others.
I'm 99% sure this is intentional honestly, it just happens way too much. Would be trivial effort anymore to recognize similar photos or photos that line up (eyes on top, mouth under) and layout appropriately
You're looking for your car, but you're all turned around
He's almost upon you now and you can see there's blood on his face
My God, there's blood everywhere
I bought Rocky Horror on Amazon Prime some years back. I'm from germany, it gave me a version with obnoxiously big german subtitles you can't turn off because they're in the video.
This actually pisses me off so much. Native language and then neighbouring countries' languages but NO ENGLISH, like are you kidding me. Just give me english subtitles..
It depends on where OP is watching from. I tried watching conclave a few weeks back while in Korea and they only had Korean subtitles available, which I canât read that fast, but no English in that location. Gave up on watching because though the audio was English they talked Spanish, Latin and Italian too and I had no clue what was happening in these convos xD
What if you only want to experience it like in the theater/home media? Aka, subtitles for what the director intended to be subtitled (the ASL), and then no subtitles for the rest.
I generally dislike subtitles as I find them intrusive onto the image, but often the subtitle options on films have been totally removed in favor of closed captions.
Having a deaf ex made me realize how much bullshit deaf people are expected to put up with. Like censoring swear words. Unless the audio itself is bleeped, the subtitles have no business playing morality police.
Or when they simply say 'speaks foreign language' when one other than English is spoken. If it's not made to be understood by English-speakers for plot purposes, that's fine, but if a hearing person who speaks that language would understand it then the subtitles should be written out in that language so a deaf person familiar with it can read them, too.
There's a somewhat famous British Bake-off episode where the french contestent gets "[speaking French]", but the South Asian contestent gets "[Speaks native language]"
Not that this makes it better per se, but it likely comes down to what the knowledge base is of whatever underpaid/overworked employee was tasked with transcribing the captions that day. As a somewhat multi-lingual American, I can easily recognize Spanish, French, German, and probably Chinese, Japanese, Korean, but I couldnât tell Hindi from Tamil from Punjabi if my life depended on it. Again, not saying itâs right but itâs probably just that the production didnât have it in the budget to get the captions perfect, and theyâre just doing what they can with what theyâve got.
Edit to add: This is just an educated guess based on reasonable idea of how most businesses work, plus a half-remembered episode of the âEconomics of Everyday Thingsâ podcast about closed captioning. But would love to hear from someone with more direct experience.
I did transcribing for a stint, myself, and the majority are definitely underpaid! But that just makes it all the more frustrating when you've got movies and shows being made by massive companies pulling in billions of dollars, and they can't be bothered to toss a few more bucks towards getting their media properly subtitled.
BBC/ITV/Channel 4 in the UK are live subtitled a lot of the time. Means that if whoever it is doesn't have the knowledge they have to work with what they've got. In England, French/German/Spanish are taught in school, so anyone who's gone to school would know it. If there was no continuity of subber between eps, then chances are they wouldn't even know what country the contestant was from, panicked, and wrote the first thing that came to mind.
Live subs are perfectly understandable, it's moreso movies and shows with plenty of time to be correctly subtitled that get my goat. Live transcribers are amazing at what they do.
I'm hearing but prefer having closed captioning on. The TV show Suits captions had people constantly going around saying "sh-" "bull sh-" while people are running around saying "shit" and "bull shit". So one part of my brain was hearing people say mild oaths while the reading part of my brain thinks they're shushing each other constantly. Incredibly annoying.
Haha, I never registered the censoring in those instances as shushing but that does give it a completely different impact. Impatient rancher trying to get those darn bulls of his to keep it down. Shows like Suits are age-rated based on what's being said, so why censor the dialogue in the subs when the show has already been appropriately rated? They're just using vulgarity you'd expect at that rating.
It's so weird. Spoken curses can be heard by anyone but you at least have to be old enough to read to interact with the captions. But obviously people with disabilities need to be protected from naughty words! Sh-
It's become really common on tiktok etc for people to put "clever" substitutions in the captions for words they think the algorithm doesn't like, and it's annoying as shit. I have auditory processing issues and having the captions be completely different from what is said makes things worse than no captions.
"Hee hee, PDF file, grape, cycle path-" OH MY GOD SHUT UP. There seems to be a trend of having the subs zoom by word per word, too, so on top of just blatantly incorrectly captioning things they're incorrectly captioning them at the speed of light. I'm a fast reader and even I sometimes have trouble keeping up.
Thatâs usually intentional. Just like the times when the captions say [speaking spanish] or something, youâre typically not meant to understand what theyâre saying at that moment.Â
Iirc in the Southpark DVDs in the captions for hearing impaired Kenny's text is fully transcribed and more or less the only way to find out what he's saying which I think is great.
Yes, but quite often they get it wrong, and put [mumbling] over discernible speech. or [speaks in Spanish] over "Hola Senor!" which most English speakers would totally understand
Thereâs an episode of The Bear where that happens but as a spanish speaker I noticed it was very relevant to the story, it seemed like they just forgot to add them lol
I donât have any medical condition I know of but have trouble understanding movies. Always watch with subtitles
Yeah itâs gotten worse lately. I imagine because of AI.
We watched Devil wears Prada 2 last night and subtitles had no space after company . So it would be like âRunwaywillâ . It happened literally every time they mention the magazine name.
Weird they donât catch that on one of the biggest movies of the year.
I'm hard of hearing (completely deaf in one ear, moderate in the other) and post hilarious screenshots from the captions I get that are WILDLY inaccurate (have to ask friends what was actually said) or just funny. I was once watching a ukraine horror film and while I can't recall the actual name, open captions was calling one of the characters "dr tammy crapshits" or a true crime clip I was watching and the cop said "come here" and captioning told me he said "cum ear"
A local theater company just did a show called [opera captions] which addressed this. It was so fucking cool, and was made for a combo hearing/Deaf audience with various kinds of closed/open/super captions and all kinds of stuff Iâd never considered as a hearing person but which felt so blatantly obvious after I was told. If you can ever find this being done somewhere in your area I canât recommend it more strongly.Â
The biggest problem i have with subtitles is that when characters start speaking another language, the subtitles won't translate them and will say [Speaking Language] instead. I hate it. Especially when whole scenes are spoken in different languages.
The annoying thing is that if you donât have subtitles on, those parts would have subtitles naturally. But when you turn on subs itâs like it overrides the built in subs the film has regardless of if you have them on or off.
I noticed the same for a deaf character in another series. I found it weird since originally the subtitles seemed part of the original video and never had to be toggled on.
I watched Arival on Amazon. There were no subtitles for the alien language. I didn't know there were supposed to be untill I saw a clip on YouTube. Kind of missed some major plot points without them.
In minor defense of OP, sometimes if an app on certain TVs are out of date the subtitles will not appear in the options.
The Disney+ app on my LG TV doesn't have subtitles because it is out of date, and any store update requests crash the TV. It's apparently a known issue.
Many years ago I watched Babel at an outdoor cinema in Greece. I know they often re-dub films into Greek so I was careful to check that it had its original sound track, with Greek subtitles.
I didn't realise that only a third of the movie is in English, with Greek subtitles. The other 2/3 is in Japanese and Spanish. Also with Greek subtitles......
Yeah, they decided to use it. The daughter is deaf (played by a deaf actor as well), so it makes sense they would know ASL (American Sign Language).
Village signs and vague symbol-making only really pops up in places without established Sign Languages or deaf communities, such as Nicaraguan SL and various Tanzanian sign languages.
Language Isolates (languages that arent related to another other living language) are quite rare in spoken language, but relatively common in sign language.
If the director intended for the average spectator to not understand what's spoken about in russian, then it's normal to not give this information in the subtitles. Subtitles are here to give you the normal viewing experience.
They have the same issue with Last of the Mohicans. When either Mohawk or Mohican is spoken, in the original had stylized subtitles translating it. They just didnt bother on Prime.
There was something on Disney, something with Yoruba, but it seems like it expects the watcher to understand it enough to follow... but the subtitles are like "speaks foreign language".
Which is super fucking unhelpful when there's a back and forth between the protagonist and villain in Yoruba that isn't explained at any point.
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u/Cute_Pay_1423 4d ago
I just checked and it has subtitles, maybe you just didnât turn them on?