prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
The worst is when you’re watching something with subtitles (in your own language because it’s hard to hear sometimes), then someone on screen speaks a different language with the subtitles hardcoded into the video.
Great, right?
Well no, because Amazon’s (or Netflix etc, they all do it) subtitles have a big “[Speaks German]” up the entire time, blocking the hard coded subs entirely so you cannot see what they say without temporarily disabling subs.
It’s so fucking stupid and infuriating. How have they not addressed this shit?
This is an accessibility issue and the FCC takes it pretty seriously. Captions must be accurate, complete, synchronized (or as close to as possible), and (this is the important one in this case) cannot obscure important information on the screen.
It’s a pretty easy form, but they do want a lot of details.
The FCC regulates closed captions on over the air broadcast television.
They’re not going to regulate the Internet streaming services.
Due to the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) of 2010 FCC does indeed regulate streaming services.
“cannot obscure important information”
The FCC is American though. Anything in a “foreign language” is clearly not important information to them.
Maybe not, but cares deeply about “equivalent experience “ which this case is not.
I’m just playing lol. Believer or not, there are at least some people left who care about such things. I’d like to think.
Sometimes for fun I’ll watch it foreign language movie I’ll turn on English dubbing and run subtitles as well. It’s really hilarious how different the two will be
Oh I hate that. Netflix animes are super bad about it. I wish they’d have the subbed English dub as well instead of a translated sub.
Yeah I remember Man in the High Castle was really terrible with subtitles. It didn’t have hard-coded subtitles at all and the programmatic ones didn’t work reliably. So I’d be sitting there and and thinking “ok am I not supposed to know what they’re saying?” After the scene goes on for a while it becomes “yeah I definitely supposed to know what they’re saying well I guess I have to mess with subtitle settings.” Sometimes it wouldn’t work at all and I’d have to open a ticket with Amazon Prime and wait until they got it working.
So I guess they gave up on fixing subtitles and just baked them in. But still fucked it up anyway. Apparently a company as big as Amazon still can’t do QA on the use case of someone who’s an english speaker just watching on their platform. It’s sad.
The only time a “[speaks German]” type of subs is acceptable is when the audience is not supposed to understand what’s being said. Obscuring the hardcoded subs with that bullshit is absolutely infuriating.
It happens on Jellyfin too but probably because the subs and videos are pulled from the same source
Doom@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I get a special kind of mad when I watch a foreign film in its original language. Turn on that language’s subtitles and the subtitles don’t match what’s being verbally said because apparently the subs have been translated into English then back into the original language so nothing matches and everything sucks. Or worse when they’ve translated some idiom for American audiences and have translated that idiom back so what’s being said makes zero sense.
NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Whenever I watch anything in Japanese with my boyfriend, we put on English subtitles for him. Meanwhile, I spend most of the time screaming internally “THAT IS NOT WHAT THEY SAID. THIS IS NOT WHAT ANYONE IS SAYING!?!” instead of actually enjoying the show.