Also some people with various things like ADHD/Autism/etc find subtitles to be distracting and find it difficult to focus on the show if it has them. The need dubs.
Some people with those same things have auditory processing issues and find it difficult to comprehend dialogue alone and thus can’t follow the show. They need subs.
Funny how intersectionality means remembering that different people have different needs and that the correct solution is options.
“Funny how intersectionality means remembering that different people have different needs and that the correct solution is options. “
this quote gets me
Living in a non-English-speaking country that doesn’t produce much media content of our own, the general mindset here is that subtitles are for translation purposes. If I buy a DVD of a movie that’s in English, ~90% of the time, it will have subtitles in Norwegian, and that’s it. I absolutely hate this. I need English subtitles on my English language media, because auditory processing disorder. I don’t need the translation; I’m fully fluent in English (in fact my written Norwegian is terrible now because I haven’t read a book that wasn’t in English for probably close to a decade)
So when I watch a show subtitled in Norwegian I get all of these little thoughts like:
“oh, that’s a terrible translation, I’d have used (other word) instead”
“do people actually say that? I’ve never heard anyone say that”
“oh, is that how you spell that word?”
and if I’m having a particularly bad day for audio processing I’m straining my mind trying to reverse translate to figure out what the characters actually said. Just give me the text in the original language. I hear perfectly fine, but my brain struggles to convert sounds into words.
Often the only subtitle option is the kind meant for Deaf/Hard of Hearing people. I’d still take that over no subs. But how hard would it be, really, to include 2-3 different subtitle tracks?
