• Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    40·
    3 days ago

    That’s either “sign language doesn’t work with our speech-to-text algorithm and we’ll be throat fucked if we hire an actual person to do a job” or some massively pretentious statement about accessibility in media.

  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    612·
    3 days 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. Like bitch, I KNOW THEY ARE SPEAKING GERMAN, MOVE THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY SO I KNOW WHAT THEY’RE SAYING

    It’s so fucking stupid and infuriating. How have they not addressed this shit?

    • k0e3@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      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.

    • Doom@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      3 days 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.

      • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        2 days 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.

      • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        “cannot obscure important information”

        The FCC is American though. Anything in a “foreign language” is clearly not important information to them.

          • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            2 days ago

            I’m just playing lol. Believe it or not, there are at least some people left in the US government who care about such things. I’d like to think…

    • yuknowhokat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      3 days ago

      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

      • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
        71·
        3 days ago

        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.

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      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.

    • Aneb@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      It happens on Jellyfin too but probably because the subs and videos are pulled from the same source

  • k0e3@lemmy.caEnglish
    827·
    3 days ago

    I mean if you have a better way to make viewers understand what people with hearing impairments go through every day, then I’m all ears.

      • PinkyPeaky@lemmy.worldEnglish
        28·
        3 days ago

        I don’t think they are against it. I think this is just a rather dark humour way to say this is my everyday normatively

        • Phoenixz@lemmy.caEnglish
          55·
          3 days ago

          I get your point bit if anyone is trying to draw attention to the plights of deaf people, this is not the way how to do it

          If I want to see this movie, I’ll get very annoyed, turn it off within 5 minutes and I’ll chrcl something else. Where is the attention now?

          • Snoopy@piefed.socialEnglish
            162·
            3 days ago

            Then how ? You just discovered it. There are plenty movies with subtitles but at least you get the experience of our daily life in 2 minutes and there is a post about it on Lemmy.

            That’s not the best experience but it worked.

            Most of time, we won’t understand when you talk. Few people will do the effort to write on a paper. And there is a lack of subtitles, interpreters. We are forced to go through various stressful situations.

            So, i love that it show you the other side. I love that you get this experience once in your life because most of time, people don’t care. They aren’t deaf and ignore it, since it don’t concern them. They have no idea how many movies, podcasts, dramas, meetings, appointements, parties, course…are inaccessible to us. They just call, talk and live on.

            Yeah it is a shame, but i hope you will be a little more aware and join us. :)

  • tigermountain@lemmy.worldEnglish
    331·
    3 days ago

    What pisses me off about subtitles is when they start displaying lyrics to songs playing in the background.

    • kip@piefed.zipEnglish
      17·
      3 days ago

      SDH subtitles (subtitles for the deaf & hard of hearing) describe all the relevant sounds in a scene including background song lyrics, there is likely to be another plain subtitle track if you don’t want that

      • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
        51·
        3 days ago

        Oh if only. I’ve seen two tracks on occasion on streaming services but it’s extremely rare. I think it was on Netflix or Prime and it’s been years since I’ve seen it. As someone who is not hard of hearing but just has a little trouble understanding sometimes it’s very useful to have the option that’s exclusively dialogue.

    • Ellvix@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      3 days ago

      If the song lyrics are relevant to the scene, sure I could see them being there. Like those songs that are custom written to do a sort of 4th wall breaking live commentary on the characters. But a lot of songs? Not needed at all.

    • Pyr@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      I don’t mind it as long as they do something like italics and little music notes or either end

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
    29·
    4 days ago

    I see this more and more with shit on streaming services where, for some fucking reason, they strip the subtitles out for the non-native language parts even tho they are supposed to be subtitled for the audience. Like for example I wanted to see the new Ghostbusters the other day since it was on HBO which I have, but half-way through I had to stop it and pirate it anyway, because all the scenes with just the bad guys talking was supposed to be subtitled but they took the god damn subs out. They didn’t even translate the dialogue in closed captioning even tho the audience is supposed to know what they are saying!

    • Wispy2891@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      3 days ago

      I was watching rental family (an american guy moves to japan to be an actor and speaks a very little japanese) and somehow they decided to ignore all the parts in japanese and from the subtitles there was only the english parts. In the beginning i was like "ok, it’s to let the audience know that the protagonist does not understand what they’re shouting to him - then finally i had to pirate a sub from opensubtitles to understand was going on as the dialogues were 95% in japanese

    • immutable@lemmy.zipEnglish
      5·
      3 days ago

      My favorite is when services will put a caption like “[speaking spanish]” over top of the English subtitles that are in a film for a Spanish speaking character.

      The film maker put the subtitles in there so if you can’t speak Spanish you can understand what the character is saying and then you can’t read it because Amazon decided to helpfully inform you they are speaking.

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.worldEnglish
      23·
      4 days ago

      My Dad is incredibly dyslexic, and it’s a legit issue for him.

      Growing up, if a movie or TV show had subs we had to take turns reading it out loud for him. I still have to catch myself trying to do automatically it when we’re watching something with other people.

      • anguo@piefed.caEnglish
        14·
        4 days ago

        I grew up in a country where movies are rarely dubbed. I was reading the subtitles out loud for my siblings who couldn’t read yet for entire movies.

      • cobysev@lemmy.worldEnglish
        41·
        4 days ago

        if a movie or TV show had subs we had to take turns reading it out loud

        I do this for my wife, because she spends most of a film on her phone.

        She’s listening to the audio and can mostly follow what’s going on by glancing at the screen and reading subtitles every now and then, but if there’s a foreign language with subtitles, or a text description (Paris, 11 AM or 10 years later, etc.), she’ll miss it and then be completely lost.

        I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to pause a movie and give a quick recap to get her caught up with the plot.

        • huppakee@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          4 days ago

          I believe Netflix order movies to be understandable to people who are not paying attention. Maybe they have something that is good enough for you, it would save you from having to recap stuff.

          • Carl@anarchist.nexusEnglish
            8·
            4 days ago

            Second Screen Viewing, yeah. Basically, Netflix is dumbing down their scripts so people can understand the plot even when it’s just playing on their second screen while they do other stuff. Apparently our attention spans have shrunk so much that people can’t even be expected to pay attention to the movies they put on.

            • Fluke@feddit.ukEnglish
              5·
              3 days ago

              Yeah. Fuck all that shit.

              I’m living in the “how it happened” stages of Idiocracy. What the fuck is this timeline?!

  • Rug_Pisser@piefed.zipEnglish
    34·
    4 days ago

    Sometimes, and specifically on Amazon prime, if a show / movie has hard coded subs (for sign or other foreign languages) you will need to turn off the optional subtitle setting.

    Of course then, when someone does speak out loud you won’t get your normal subs until you turn the setting back on. I used to put in a new complaint for each show that it happened on until i canned prime altogether and went back to pirating all their content.

    • Carighan Maconar@piefed.worldEnglish
      61·
      4 days ago

      Germany adds the funky police that sometimes only German subtitles are allowed no matter the audio language you pick. So if there are no German-language subtitles because none were ever made, well you’re shit out of luck now, fuck you and your subtitle needs! 😐

    • yermaw@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      Its really weird that they do that. Like I would have assumed that the hardcoded subs were part of the video.

  • FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websiteEnglish
    5611·
    4 days ago

    I am conflicted here. On the one hand, I agree that subtitles would have been nice. On the other hand, I think folks with hearing disabilities get shut out of other content so much that I don’t think this somewhat solitary case makes it good mildly infuriating material. It’s most likely just an oversight. Much less likely a clever scheme to highlight ableism.

    • drcobaltjedi@programming.devEnglish
      111·
      4 days ago

      I mean, by US law (back when analog TV was standard) all TV broadcasts had to include closed captions on scanline 23(?) for people with hearing disabilities. it was part of the vertical blanking interval so it didn’t interfere with the regularly visible broadcast. It is good to include subtitles for all dialogue, spoken in the local dialect, in a foreign dialect, and even the various sign languages. That’s isn’t to say that yes, I fully agree that differently abled people should be able to take part in the dialog and should have accommodations where needed.

      Semi related, did you know American sign language is closer to French sign language than it is to British sign language?

  • FluidBeef@quokk.auEnglish
    33·
    4 days ago

    This film would never work for second screen viewers because the characters would have to nonstop be saying “I’m being really quiet” or “we can’t make any noise, even loud breathing, or the monster will get us”.

  • Billegh@lemmy.worldEnglish
    26·
    4 days ago

    🫵🤏🤞🤞🤘☝️👍🤌👍🤞🤌🫱🫲🫷👉👐🫶🙌🫶🤛