I agree. That said, my wife subtitles every movie which normally I don't care about, except the subtitles are -wrong-. I don't know why they do that, it seems rather innocent, but drives me crazy as an English speaker. It's usually something not even so consequential..off the top of my head like replacing 'Time for dinner' with 'Time for supper'. Not an exact example, but it's usually along these lines.
Basically in “the good old days” translating/subtitling was a serious job for serious money. But it has been turned into almost a “work from home, gig economy Mechanical Turk” thing.
That drives me crazy too! Some shows are pretty faithful, but others are way off. The otherwise-wonderful Cuatro Estaciones en la Habana is especially bad -- it replaces all the local Cuban slang w/ standard Spanish, e.g., they'll subtitle imbécil when the dialog is comemierda. Why would you do that?!
Also strongly agree w/ GP; in my experience, you've got to hide the english to learn anything. Otherwise your brain isn't working in the target language.
Nope, original English shows. What's frustrating is that my wife uses subtitles for learning how words are spelled, but the words spoken aren't the same as the ones written!
From what I've heard, when dubbing shows they normally adapt the translations for the dub to fit better with the character's mouth movements and to make it more 'idiomatic' in the target language, but the subtitles keep the literal translation. It would be interesting to learn why, I find it drives me crazy as well.
This has been an issue with Netflix for years. It's almost as if the translators of movie or TV series don't have access to the videos themselves because every other sentence is slightly wrong.
