Why Streaming Subtitles Are Always Slightly Wrong
Thanks to the total recycling of the modern audio mixture, it has become almost impossible to understand what someone says in movies and television shows. This is why so many people who are not deaf or hard of hearing have started to light the subtitles so that they do not lack important intrigue points.
If you have done this, you may have noticed that the subtitles do not always correspond exactly to the real dialogue. Most of the time, it is not an important difference, but it led me to ask me Why Exactly I see that so often. It turns out that there are many reasons for subtitles to postpone dialogue – and not all are mistakes!
The origins of subtitle scripts
One of the most important questions is the place where streaming services get their subtitles in the first place. With less original content, Netflix or Amazon do not manually create new subtitles for each program and film. The subtitles are provided by the creator or the owner of content, and these can come from various places.
One of the reasons for the differences between the subtitles and the spoken dialogue could be due to the work flow of creating a show or a film. There may have been additional publishing or shooting changes after the legendary script was sent, for example, and no one has taken the trouble to repair it. Remember that subtitle errors are not new, they also occurred on the physical media. Thus, in some cases, these original subtitles were simply inherited by streaming services.
Time and cost constraints
Like so many things, the creation of subtitles is a work that is outsourced, made by the lowest tenderer and under tight deadlines. Doing quality control over thousands of dialogue lines is also a challenge, and even if small differences are picked up, it is probably good enough for subtitles.
It should also be remembered that it is not only the English subtitles that are created, but those in a range of main languages. When the translation is involved, there is even more latitude so that the dialogue and the original subtitles differ. If you speak two or more languages, try to watch a movie or show using translated subtitles, and you will notice how translations tend to sometimes take fairly important liberties.
There is also the interesting case where the English dub of a show has its own subtitle, then the English translation subtitles are completely different. This makes sense, because the soundtrack of the dub must correspond to this dialogue, and the translation must correspond to what is said in the original language. I saw some anime, however, where there is only one subtitle, and it is for the DUB. So, even if you look at the show in Japanese, the subtitles are not really the translation of the dialogue!
Technical and directive limitations
There is only so much space on the screen, people can only read so quickly, and the text can only be so small. This means that in some films, the subtitles will have to be paraphrases or otherwise shortened so that he can follow the video.
Different ends, different subtitles
I noticed that the same program or the same film on different platforms can have different subtitles. This could be due to the fact that, for any reason, a platform has chosen to make a new version of the subtitles, or it could be that the two services obtained their subtitles from different versions of the content.
It is also important to know that there are different types of subtitles. Closed legends are specifically intended for deaf or hard of hearing viewers, and the objective is not necessarily to correspond exactly to the spoken dialogue. These subtitles also include audio clues and can have more latitude with changes in favor of making things easier to understand from the point of view of accessibility.
Again, a subtitle which is a translation of another language can have all kinds of location changes, and is rarely supposed to be direct and literal translations of the original dialog box.
Why perfection rarely arrives
Most of the time, however, when the subtitle is a little false, it is just the result of a human error. Just like spelling errors. The person may have heard badly what has been said (which can blame him with these terrible mixtures of dialogue) or otherwise spoiled.
I suspect that there are also many subtitles generated by AI of these days, with a human supervising the result of quality control, and that the quality control phase is a key opportunity for errors to cross.
In the end, I think that until recently, the subtitles were considered a small bonus add-on, and not as a major or important aspect of the content, but while more and more people are starting to count on subtitles, these small cracks will be more apparent. The good news is that sometimes you can point out the errors in subtitles for streaming services, and if you are lucky, someone could actually open the file and solve the problem.
