this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2026
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I'm mainly talking about watching a TV show or movie that's originally in English enabling subtitles that's either in Spanish, German, Russian, Finnish, etc. and can mistakes in translation still occur? I recall watching Lie to Me with Japanese subtitles during a scene involving an interrogation but a key word within the dialog was not translated correctly based on context.

For example, the protagonist said "You're an accessory for murder" towards the suspect but subtitles used the wrong word choice ๅฐ็‰ฉ (which means "accessories" as in small goods, i.e. stationery or trinkets) when the intended meaning for "accessory" from that context leans more on being a conspirator (ๅ…ฑ็Šฏ่€… or ๅ…ฑ่ฌ€) of a crime (like as in aiding the criminal).

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[โ€“] MyButSmellsBat@feddit.org 1 points 22 hours ago

True, they are doing the work of translating twice.

And sometimes there are existing two types of subtitles, but the standard case is that it's based on the original language. For learning italian i searched a lot for subtitles that are based on the italian dupped version. It often has a "forced" in the filename (and is unfortunatly quite difficult to find)