Comment by duffycommaryan
2 days ago
Language is incredibly complex. I remember a TikTok from a bilingual English-Korean speaker comparing the English subtitles from a Squid Game scene to what was actually being said by the characters. The nuance and info density lost in translation made the subtitles feel completely remedial. Americans were basically watching a different show altogether.
I'm by no means a native level Japanese speaker but I'm frequently surprised at how off Japanese-English subtitles can be.
I was watching the Netflix show The Empress with Chinese subtitles that did a pretty good job translating the German. I switched to English subs for one episode and couldn't stop telling the people I was watching with "That's not what he said! That's completely different!"