Films and TV shows and more often have subtitles, which are helpful for enjoying muted video, translation, people with hearing impairment, people struggling to understand accents, checking fast unclear dialogue and other reasons. They are important, and sometimes it’s clear when they do something right or wrong.
Maybe we can’t expect them all to be works of art, but there are certainly some easy wins even in the industrial media environment. What do you think?
One trend which annoys me is having meaningful non-English simply listed as ‘[speaking language]’
Even worse is when, despite being another language, a common word (whether homophonic or loan words) would by understood regardless, just isn’t present in the captions.
The version of this I hate is when a program has built in hard sub translation for foreign language sections, which get covered up by the soft subs only saying “< speaking [language] >”. So now my deaf ass can understand one language or the other, but not both without toggling captions on and off constantly.