PARLEZ-VOUS ENGLISH?

There are various reasons for using subtitles. The first major reason is for watching foreign films is to understand what people are saying. It might be interesting to watch without subtitles but I suspect you would lose a lot not understanding the language.

Another reason for subtitles is for the hearing impaired people or those people, myself included, who can’t always hear what is being said especially if it’s English spoken with various accents. And third, I have a unique reason for subtitles and that’s because I work as a transcriptionist and it helps me to see subtitles for style and comparison to my own transcribing.

Here is another modern way to learn a language. Let’s use Spanish, for example. I’m thinking of moving to the Southwest and should learn a bit of Spanish. There are quite a bit of Spanish language films on DVD’s that can even be found at the local library. By putting on the English subtitles, you can listen to the Spanish and get the translation at the same time. If you are really ambitious, you can watch the film a second time without the subtitles and remember some of the Spanish translation.

Having majored in French when I was in college and if I were to teach it nowadays, I would probably do just that with a French film. Some movies are dubbed into English, for example, and it can be distracting to see Asian people speaking English with a Midwest or Southern Accent. The films seem a lot more realistic when kept in the original language with subtitles. Also, idiomatic expressions can sometimes be lost in translation.

I have, however, on the negative side, seen some pretty awkward translation of some languages in subtitles that turn what is not originally a comedy film into a comedy film. So, thank you all translators and all transcribers or transcriptionists and editors for giving us a realm of film choices for us film buffs.