Thanks to the total trash-fire that is modern audio mixing, it’s become almost impossible to understand what anyone is saying in movies and TV shows. Which is why so many people who are not deaf or hard of hearing have started turning on the subtitles so they don’t miss important plot points.
If you’ve been doing this, you might have noticed that the subtitles don’t always match the actual dialogue exactly. Most of the time it’s not an important difference, but that did lead me to wonder why exactly I see this so often. It turns out there are plenty of reasons for the subtitles to differ from the dialogue—and not all of them are mistakes!
The Origins of Subtitle Scripts
One of the most important questions is where streaming services get their subtitles in the first place. Barring original content, Netflix or Amazon aren’t manually creating new subtitles for every show and movie. The subtitles are provided by the content creator or owner, and these can come from a variety of places.
One reason for differences between the subtitles and spoken dialogue could be due to the workflow of creating a show or movie. There may have been some additional editing or shot changes after the caption script had been sent off, for example, and no one bothered to fix it. Remember, subtitle errors aren’t new, they happened on physical media too. So, in some cases, those original subtitles were simply inherited by the streaming services.
Time Constraints and Costs
Like so many things, creating subtitles is a job that gets outsourced, done by the lowest bidder, and under tight deadlines. Doing quality control on thousands of lines of dialogue is also a challenge, and even if small discrepancies are picked up, it’s probably good enough for the purpose subtitles exist.
It’s also worth remembering that it’s not just English subtitles that are being created, but ones in a range of major languages. When translation is involved, there’s even more leeway for the original dialogue and subtitles to differ. If you speak two or more languages, try watching a movie or show using translated subtitles, and you’ll notice how the translations tend to take fairly large liberties sometimes.
There’s also the interesting case where the English dub of a show has its own subtitle, and then the English translation subtitles are completely different. This makes sense, because the dub’s soundtrack needs to match that dialogue, and the translation needs to match what’s said in the original language. I’ve seen a few anime, however, where there’s just one subtitle, and it’s for the dub. So even if you watch the show in Japanese, the subtitles are not actually the translation of the dialogue!
Technical Limitations and Guidelines
There’s only so much space on-screen, people can only read so fast, and the text can only be so small. Which means that in certain films the subtitles will have to be paraphrased or otherwise shortened so that it can keep up with the video.
Different Purposes, Different Subtitles
I’ve noticed that the same show or movie on different platforms can have different subtitles. This could be because, for some reason, one platform chose to do a new version of the subtitles, or it could be that the two services sourced their subtitles from different versions of the content.
It’s also important to know that there are different types of subtitles. Closed captions are specifically meant for deaf or hard of hearing viewers, and the goal is not necessarily to match the spoken dialogue exactly. These subtitles also include audio cues, and can have more leeway with changes in favor of making things easier to understand from an accessibility perspective.
Again, a subtitle that’s a translation from another language can have all sorts of localization changes, and is rarely meant to be direct and literal translations of the original dialog.
Why Perfection Rarely Happens
A lot of the time, however, when the subtitle is a little wrong, it’s just the result of human error. Just like spelling errors. The person might have misheard what was said (who can blame them with these terrible dialog mixes) or otherwise messed up a little.
I suspect that there’s a lot of AI-generated subtitling going on as well these days, with a human overseeing the result for quality control, and that quality control phase is a prime opportunity for mistakes to make it through.
Ultimately, I think until recently, subtitles have been seen as a little bonus add-on, and not a major or important aspect of the content, but as more people start to rely on subtitles, those small cracks will be more apparent. The good news is that sometimes you can report errors in subtitles for streaming services, and if you’re lucky, someone might actually open up the file and fix the problem.