ꙮ tatybara ꙮ

@tati

writer of human & machine words

she/it
tati.codes/

trans. cyborg. hermit-lite. 30ish. script kitty.

Loves:

-@julez

-fighting games

_tati on discord.

ꙮ tatybara ꙮ @tati4/23/2023, 3:08 PM

bcj @bcj

dante, personally @dante4/23/2023, 7:11 AM

i think that if you're captioning a film and you don't spell out all "foreign" words in their original language you should be drawn and quartered. the point of captions is that the textual information should match the audio information

to clarify in case i didn't make it obvious enough: i'm not saying all spoken dialogue should be translated. i'm saying the captions should accurately display the dialogue spoken, regardless of language. e.g.:

BOB: hello i am speaking english.
SARAH: hola estoy hablando español.

instead of the much more common

BOB: hello i am speaking english.
SARAH: [SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]

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in reply to @dante's post:

Amy Dentata @amydentata4/23/2023, 7:35 AM

that said, there are some shows that are multi-lingual with the expectation that the audience knows all of what's being said, so in those cases it makes sense to subtitle everything in one language. before streaming and international markets, those films would have baked subtitles for the foreign languages.

dante, personally @dante4/23/2023, 7:39 AM

This makes sense! What I'm more referring to is the situation where a movie (let's say a movie where the primary language is english) has a subtitle track that just completely omits all spoken lines in Italian. Or worse, subtitles those with the useless stand-in of "Speaking foreign language". That's the shit that I hate.

Amy Dentata @amydentata4/23/2023, 7:40 AM

yeah that's seriously bad. "[foreign]" should be a relic from the 90s

I left Cohost, see bio for details @AriaSalvatrice4/23/2023, 4:21 PM

i like when youtube autogenerated subs put [foreign] on my music, i feel like i'm doing a good job

Amy Dentata @amydentata4/23/2023, 7:10 PM

yeah most of the generated captions for my music are an endless litany of [foreign] and [applause]

Kat A. Beckett @KaterinaBucket4/23/2023, 6:14 PM

my favourite is when someone drops, like, a tiny snippet of spanish or french or whatever that the english-speaking audience is expected to understand, like "hola amigo, how you doin?" and the subtitles say "[speaking foreign language] how you doin?"

remi @dohz4/23/2023, 7:43 AM

was just about to comment about the [speaking foreign language] thing that shit drives me up the wall, especially when it’s a movie/show that’s all about the culture that speaks that language in question

cassie @porglezomp4/23/2023, 8:05 AM

might be fun to give those two sets of subtitles, put the spoken language at the top and the translation with the regular dialogue subtitles. (if you want to preserve the information, but also convey the understanding that's intended)

Millennium @milliesquilly4/23/2023, 7:46 AM

Yes, I have a memory of watching a film with captions on and like a guy walks past a person in France who says "bonjour" and the subtitles just do the [SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] thing for that one word like seriously do they think that's acceptible?

I feel like there must have been someone who wrote a style guide for captions at some point that has all these ass-backwards ideas about how to write them and honestly we need to find this style guide and destroy all copies because what the fuck

willow @Willow4/23/2023, 8:16 AM

bad bad movie obviously but this shit killed me with in the heights, where the spanish is all subtitled “speaks spanish”. EVERYONE IN THE MOVIE SPEAKS SPANISH AND IT’S OFTEN PLOT IMPORTANT

dante, personally @dante4/23/2023, 8:18 AM

I WOULD SAY IN THE MOVIE "IN THE HEIGHTS", ABOUT A NOTABLY SPANISH-SPEAKING AREA OF NEW YORK, IT'S PRETTY IMPORTANT TO KNOW WHICH WORDS OF SPANISH THEY ARE SPEAKING,

willow @Willow4/23/2023, 8:19 AM

YOU’D CERTAINLY THINK SO!!!

d🔶@geometric4/23/2023, 8:42 AM

AUDIO: hey you wanna go to taco bell
SUBTITLE: hey you wanna go to [foreign language] bell

Ceryl the Pretty @ceryl4/23/2023, 3:45 PM

I've got to disagree. Subtitles aren't just closed captions, and shouldn't just be treated that way. There are films where a lack of comprehension is an inherent or even vital point of the narrative (such as The Thing, Lost In Translation, and Incendies). What benefit does subtitling every spoken word bring?

That's not even considering films where subtitles are used for stylistic emphasis (John Wick), to put the audience off-balance (Skinamarink), or to deliver regular ol' jokes (Airplane! and Holy Grail).

There are bad subtitling/captioning jobs (I haven't seen In The Heights so I can't speak to it), and obviously it's important to play to context, but "subtitles for everything" just doesn't sit right to me.

dante, personally @dante4/23/2023, 5:49 PM

Ok but if I (viewer) understand spanish, and a character onscreen speaks spanish, I will understand what they say regardless of subtitling. If another viewer, who does not speak spanish, saw spanish subtitles, they would still not understand the spanish-speaking character, because a non-spanish-understanding viewer would not be able to read spanish.

what i'm griping about here is the lack of parity between spoken dialogue and subtitles. if you don't understand the language being spoken, you won't be able to read it either, and thus the feeling of incomprehension is maintained. i don't think there's any way it would harm an intended watch experience.