Subtitles

[loveschak]

Last night I watched The City of Lost Children (La cité des enfants perdus). As usual when I watch French movies, I watched it without dubbing and with French subtitles. (I do this because I don't understand spoken French well enough to watch without subtitles, particularly when characters' mouths are off-screen, but I still prefer to enjoy a movie

Comments

[madcaptenor]

Occasionally I've watched movies in English with English subtitles. (For example, I did this when I lived on Walnut and I wanted to have my windows open while watching the movie, since there was lots of noise from the street.) I don't recall ever seeing something this egregious. Sometimes a few words would be missing from the subtitles that were in the spoken script; I attribute this to some (perhaps incorrect?) assumption that people read slower than they speak.

Also, I must say that it never occurred to me to watch movies with subtitles in the original language, but it's a good idea, at least in languages in which I can read quickly enough (French, and maybe Spanish).

[loveschak]

I got the idea from some immigrants I knew who watched American TV with closed captioning when they were learning English.

I've heard that there are minor inconsistencies in English subtitles because the subtitles are taken from the script, but I don't know whether that's true, and it was definitely not the case in Cité.

[chookbobberki]

Also, and this might be obvious, there is the matter of fitting the dialogue into displayable text phrases that can be read with ease, and have a minimum of unfortunate breaks between chunks of text.
For pure watchability it makes some sense I think, but completely ruins the accuracy and language-practice style of viewing that you do (and I wish I could do, but for some reason they never ever include japanese subtitles in any movies released here :( ).

[loveschak]

That's true, but it's definitely not the case here. For example, "Courage" is easier to fit on the screen than "Sois courageuse."

Except for old DVDs that were probably mastered before regions were created, they only seem to put English, Spanish, and French on Region 1 DVDs, since those are the languages spoken in Region 1 (Canada, USA, and Mexico).

[madcaptenor]

Often it's only English and Spanish on Region 1 DVDs, since French is by far the least common of those three languages in the region.

[madcaptenor]

Actually, Mexico is in Region 4. Region 1 is the U. S., Canada, and according to some sources Bermuda. But that probably doesn't change the order of the most common languages in Region 1 -- either way I think it's English, then Spanish, then French.