Subtitles: When and for whom?
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Skeet from Lane Greene:
Oof. The Spanish national broadcaster is apologizing for having subtitled in interview with the mother of member of the men's World Cup team, because of her Andalucian accent.
— Lane Greene (@lanegreene.bsky.social) June 26, 2026 at 4:56 AM
He adds:
On one hand: I get the annoyance in Andalusia.
On the other: they're well aware of the difficulties their accent causes! It's a point of regional pride!
Probably a mistake to subtitle, but a shame-faced "It was a great mistake" is perhaps more than strictly needed.
— Lane Greene (@lanegreene.bsky.social) June 26, 2026 at 4:56 AM
Hell, my own US southern family's accent caused my wife to whisper to me in Danish "what… are they saying….?" and her English is the best of any non-native-speaker I have ever met. People in the (US) south know they speak differently, and are proud there too.
— Lane Greene (@lanegreene.bsky.social) June 26, 2026 at 4:56 AM
I've heard similar stories about communication problems across varieties of Dutch and Italian, and in fact there are probably no widely-spoken languages where this isn't an issue. And for English, see also Glaswegian, e.g.
…where for most of us, it helps to turn on the subtitles.
VVOV said,
June 26, 2026 @ 8:14 am
A classic treatment of this issue is this now-ancient skit from the Iraq War era: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r35OsSLfy5o
"What do I need subtitles for!? I studied English at the bloody American University in Cairo."
Chris Button said,
June 26, 2026 @ 8:32 am
I would say it can be just as much to do with geography, culture, and historical time depth. And that can affect any language regardless of how widely spoken it may be.
Jerry Packard said,
June 26, 2026 @ 9:03 am
I’m happy to have English subtitles for some of the British shows for lexical items and for US shows with a lot of medical terminology.
Athel Cornish-Bowden said,
June 26, 2026 @ 9:07 am
In France (where regional variations are far less prominent than they are in Spain or England), it's quite usual to put subtitles for people whose French is perfectly intelligible, typically Africans, Haitians and Québécois. I don't think I've come across it for people from the south of France, but I wouldn't fall off my chair in surprise if I did.
.mau. said,
June 26, 2026 @ 9:52 am
Fun fact: When I watched Napoli-New York https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22490428 (in Italian, of course, I am Italian) the parts in English were subtitled. But I would have rather needed subtitles when the characters talked in Neapolitan dialect :-)
Robert Coren said,
June 26, 2026 @ 10:20 am
We started using subtitles for British TV shows a few years ago, and we actually now do it for US shows as well, as there seems to be an increasing tendency for the actors to mumble or talk really fast (probably an attempt to be more realistic). I've noticed that the subtitling for the British shows often seems to be done by someone not especially familiar with British idioms; my favorite example was a Miss Marple a few years ago which included a scene in which bridge was being played in the background, and a subtitle showed up saying "Low B" – the transcriber apparently not being aware that the British say "no bid" where USAns say "pass".
I do wish, though, that there was an option to get only the actual dialogue transcribed; the captions describing background sounds (as well as indicating that someone is "breathing heavily" and the like) are clearly intended for people who can't hear at all, as distinguished from those who have some trouble with indistinct dialogue.
SlideSF said,
June 26, 2026 @ 10:53 am
I'm with Robert Coren in leaving subtitles on all the time, even shows in my native AmE. So much of what happens in the dialog can be missed because of mumbling, or even ambient noises in the viewing room (or even outside). I got in the habit because my wife is Thai, and it helps her immensely to understand what is being said. I only realized later, from turning the subtitles off when I was watching solo, how much I was missing. Now I feel like I can't watch without subtitles. Whether or not this is because I am allowing my ears to get lazy is something I wonder from time to time.
Tangential to Mr Coren's complaint about captions describing sound effects, but to me even more annoying is that when foreign languages are being spoken, and subtitles are provided in the original, the captions will only display [Speaking in Foreign Language]. First off, it is obviously foreign, as one could tell even if hard of hearing, since captions appear translating it. But worse, that ever-so-helpful script is superimposed over the translation in such a way that you cannot read it. I'm not sure how this became the convention for captioning, but I wish someone would realize how useless it is. The amount of information lost by those not realizing the language was different would be far less than is currently the case.
cervantes said,
June 26, 2026 @ 12:16 pm
The Jamaican movie The Harder They come is in English with English subtitles. About 1/3 of the way through they drop the subtitles because you pick it up. I'm not aware that Jamaicans were offended by that.
Chester Draws said,
June 26, 2026 @ 6:08 pm
it's quite usual to put subtitles for people whose French is perfectly intelligible, typically Africans, Haitians and Québécois.
Well, they may be intelligible to you, but not to everyone.
My French is not great, but when we lived there we made a point of watching French TV. I could understand a sentence in in Québécois, but it took me so long that I would lose the next sentence. I needed subtitles if they were saying anything of length. I understood a strong Haitian accent not at all.
I don't need them for Geordie or Glaswegian "English" either, but I prefer them.
Kate Bunting said,
June 27, 2026 @ 9:19 am
Conversely, I (UK) sometimes put subtitles on for American shows because I can't always pick up on their colloquial idioms when spoken quickly.
JPL said,
June 27, 2026 @ 3:52 pm
I often put the subtitles on when I hear somebody use an unusual word or expression, just to see if they got it right; more often than not, they don't. I should start making a list of examples. Some are "performance errors" that the subtitles "correct", some are what you might call "learned register", drawn from a cultural repertoire not available to the typical TV audience. Some are just creative uses of language. Sometimes the expressions are not included at all in the subtitles. Not just the "shows", but also the news programs.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
June 27, 2026 @ 5:04 pm
For Limmy, I think this is a good starting point:
https://youtu.be/woywHvF1DjQ?si=dZJmq0ql_hyQSwtL
("The Linguistics of Limmy's Show")
Especially the bit starting at about 3:50. BTW I always find it very symptomatic that if you apply regular English spellings rather than Scots spellings to that kind of material, it suddenly transpires that the grammar is essentially Standard English, and it all boils down to accent. Almost ;P
rosie said,
June 28, 2026 @ 2:07 am
I too find most Glaswegians hard to understand (though there are welcome exceptions such as Billy Connolly). But a more prevalent problem, I find, is with Americans, whose speech needs not only subtitles but occasionally glosses for unfamiliar phrases and words used in unfamiliar senses. The English of East Asian speakers can also be hard to understand.
M. Paul Shore said,
June 28, 2026 @ 2:17 am
I’m surprised that the comments so far have barely brought up the issue of errors in same-language subtitles. Of course the frequency of those errors varies widely depending on the material, but I would never grade such subtitles higher than a very rare A-minus, and all too often I’d grade them as low as a D. I would never place any actual trust in them: at best, I can see them being occasionally useful as hints. The producers of those materials apparently almost never have any proofreading done, their apparent attitude being “Well, the computer generated the subtitles, so they must be perfect”. Another example of the decades-long process of language-related work coming to be regarded as menial labor that’s almost entirely unfit for human involvement.
bks said,
June 28, 2026 @ 5:04 am
We have them on for most modern fare, even in U.S. English, but have to turn them off for stand-up comedy because the subtitle often appears before the punchline, ruining the joke.
Daniel Deutsch said,
June 28, 2026 @ 6:11 am
Television picture quality is better than ever, but the tiny built-in speakers are a reason so many viewers use subtitles.
Chris Button said,
June 28, 2026 @ 3:18 pm
The funniest subtitling I ever saw was: "We'll chop his arms and legs off, and then he'll be impotent."
Barbara Phillips Long said,
June 28, 2026 @ 11:22 pm
After reading elsewhere some online comments about whether young people from various generations are familiar with music hits from several decades earlier, I went to listen to They Might Be Giants' version of Istanbul (Not Constantinople). The song came out in 1953, but They Might Be Giants included it on their album Flood in 1990.
The song's music video has very erratic and incomplete subtitles. The word Turks first appears as "terms," but later appears as "turks," without the capital T. Whole sections of lyrics never appear on screen. At one point, the subtitle says there's applause, but I never noticed it. Among the more unhelpful subtitles are the opening ones, which appear this way (as music that imitates Middle Eastern music plays):
foreign
[Music]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XlO39kCQ-8
Robert Coren said,
June 29, 2026 @ 9:06 am
I think in some cases, at least for US shows, the captioning comes from a written script – which occasionally results in discrepancies when some line of dialogue is either added or deleted in performance – but that's clearly not the case for those British ones with mistranscriptions. I always turn the captions off for sports events, where of course the transcription has to be done in real time, which means that it's generally significantly behind the actual action, and whoever or whatever is doing it can be really thrown off by unfamiliar player names.
Another irritating (and also occasionally amusing or downright baffling) aspect of the non-speech elements in captions is the various attempts to characterize the background music.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
June 29, 2026 @ 11:36 am
I hear you, Robert,
When the caption reads, [DISQUIETING MUSIC PLAYING], I want to holler at the screen, "Hey, _I'm_ the one who's supposed to decide how the ambient music makes me feel about the story arc!
Milan said,
June 29, 2026 @ 4:19 pm
Subtitling has become much more common because many people consume media on mobile devices without headphones and/or in noisy environments. That makes even clearly spoken, well recorded speech in Standard/prestige varieties difficult to understand. This then leads to a feedback events. Since there are subtitles anyway, actors may mumble for reasons of expressiveness or realism. Consequently, even people who are listening under ideal conditions need subtitles to follow.