# Bilinguals. Do TV producers do a good job of translating? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** movies\ **Created:** [April 2, 2026, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983 "2026-04-02T22:04:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Grrr](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/grrr/32/146_2.png) [@Grrr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grrr)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2026, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983/1 "2026-04-02T22:04:25Z")
Bc I’m watching a show that is mostly in English. But in parts of it they speak some kind of Asian. The subtitles from the movie were not the same as a subtitles from my TV. The overall jist was the same but the words were not. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2026, 10:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983/2 "2026-04-02T22:13:10Z")
They have neither the budget nor the time to hire multilingual Nobel-Prize winners. However, even a good translation is not necessarily word for word. It may often be reasonable to creatively convey the intended style and meaning rather than to translate every single word literally and throw in a lot of footnotes so that you “get” all the references. If you understood the meaning, and they did not blunder or omit anything, I would say you got an average to above-average experience. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2026, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983/3 "2026-04-02T22:33:08Z")
I began working as a professional translator as an undergraduate. Translations can vary quite a bit and still convey the meaning of a passage, depending on the translator’s preference. Seldom is there one and only one way to render a sentence. A skilled translator sticks to the style in which a work is written. If it’s a scientific paper or an official report, it will be quite formal and precise. If it’s fiction, the characters will likely use colloquial language. I remember translating a short story in which a woman was criticized _xopom_ (derived from the Russian word for “choir”) by her sisters. I translated _xopom_ as “in unison,” though another might have written “as one.” Translating is a skill that takes years to acquire, and you never stop trying to improve it. I’ve seen very few translations produced by either AI or humans hired to write them that impressed me. When it comes to actors trying to speak a foreign language, the results are usually laughable. Even with coaching, phonetic translations don’t come close to replicating native speech. Back when I was still watching _ **NCIS** _, I cringed every time Gibbs tried to speak Russian. ---
**Author:** ![DigitalC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ebca7d/32.png) [@DigitalC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DigitalC)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2026, 10:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983/4 "2026-04-02T22:41:12Z")
No, but the subtitles often do not match what is spoken even in the same language. It’s mostly “close enough” ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2026, 10:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983/5 "2026-04-02T22:43:04Z")
AI-generated subtitles are abysmal because they rely on how a word is pronounced, rather than written. ---
**Author:** ![DigitalC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ebca7d/32.png) [@DigitalC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DigitalC)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2026, 10:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983/6 "2026-04-02T22:44:23Z")
No, the problem has existed since long before AI. I remember when the new Doctor Who started I had a very hard time with the accents and had to use subtitles, and while the meaning was the same the words did not exactly match what was said on screen. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2026, 10:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983/7 "2026-04-02T22:51:15Z")
That’s quite common, since (as indicated above) different translators are apt to render things differently unless they’re sticking to prepared scripts. When it comes to television and the movies, wording might be changed slightly due to time constraints, but a good translator will still be able to convey the meaning. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2026, 10:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983/8 "2026-04-02T22:58:11Z")
Note too that a good translator will always write well in his or her native language, and in a variety of different styles. ---
**Author:** ![Mighty\_Mouse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mighty_mouse/32/7776_2.png) [@Mighty\_Mouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mighty_Mouse)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2026, 11:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983/9 "2026-04-02T23:17:49Z")
I have watched television shows in a European language that I understand quite well and in Urdu/Hindi which I understand very well. The quality of translation varies dramatically, shall we say. The shows produced by public broadcasters are very, very good. I am married to a professional interpreter/translator. I cannot watch a Chinese show with translated subtitles. She is often enraged. ---
**Author:** ![Reply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/reply/32/15952_2.png) [@Reply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reply)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2026, 11:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983/10 "2026-04-02T23:30:09Z")
I think sometimes studios will farm out the dubbing and subtitling work to different studios, for some godawful reason. Netflix does this often, like with their newish Ghost in the Shell series. The English dub often won’t match the English subtitles because two different groups made them, presumably at different times. No idea why they don’t just wait for the dub to finish so the voice actors can have their creative interpretations and then simply subtitle the actual performance, rather than translating from the original subtitles directly. Tthe quality of translations and dubs vary greatly from show to show. With the Asian languages in particular, China owns quite a bit of Hollywood these days so they’ll often throw in a few Chinese actors and Mandarin phrases here and there while also paying for Western celebs to play main roles… they do that whether or not the story really calls for it; it’s just a way for China to start to export some of their own culture and also broaden domestic appeal a bit. A prime example of this is the popcorn-shark-trash movie [Meg 2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meg_2:_The_Trench) with Jason Statham and a few semi-famous Chinese actors, or Arrival from a few years ago. Sometimes the non-Chinese actors will speak a few lines of Mandarin, usually not very well, and the subtitles may or may not actually match what they tried to say. Other times you have high-quality shows like [Drops of God](https://tv.apple.com/us/show/drops-of-god/umc.cmc.497ttx33nudgzywis3i2bnvuk), which is in a mix of English, French, and Japanese, with both native and non-native speakers of each. The subtitling is done well, the acting is superb, and the accents are believable… the natives sound native (at least to my ear) while the non-natives sound non-native when speaking someone else’s language. Not sure if the actors themselves are native, but if not, the casting is similarly phenomenal. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2026, 12:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983/11 "2026-04-03T00:06:39Z")
I was surprised to hear Meg speaking perfect Russian on _ **Family Guy** _. I then realized it was only natural, since Mila Kunis is Ukrainian by birth. She’s as perfectly bilingual as my daughter, who could speak flawless Russian and English at the age of two-and-a-half. ---
**Author:** ![CairoCarol](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cairocarol/32/3825_2.png) [@CairoCarol](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CairoCarol)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2026, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983/12 "2026-04-03T00:15:16Z")
TV shows in English often have inaccuracies in their Indonesian subtitles. My favorite (I’ve posted this before) was this exchange from _Numbers_, where the FBI agent was talking to his math-savant brother about a math-genius criminal they were trying to catch: **brother** : This guy’s going to be hard to catch. He’ very smart! **FBI agent:** _Your_ kind of smart. To any fluent English speaker, the meaning of the agent’s words were clear: yes, the criminal is very smart, but the math-savant brother has the same kind of intellect - “his intelligence is a lot like your intelligence!!” - so because the brother can think like the criminal, he will be good at figuring out how to catch him. The Indonesian subtitle writer didn’t recognize that the word uttered was “your,” not “you’re”, and the subtitle they wrote was the equivalent of English “you are sort of smart.” ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2026, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983/13 "2026-04-03T00:29:44Z")
Some of the Russian translations I’ve heard bear no resemblance whatsoever to the English dialogue. At one point in the third _ **Rambo** _ movie (the one set in Afghanistan but filmed in Israel), the big, bad Russian commander (who was actually Dutch and spoke crappy Russian) cries _“Who are you?!?”_, and Sly answers “Your worst nightmare.” The Russian translation was, if I recall correctly, “I’m the arm of Almighty God!” Another hilarious but understandable mistranslation came in a movie where two Good Old Boys were in a high-speed chase across a field and an outhouse suddenly loomed in front of them. The English line was “Look out, don’t hit the shed!” The Russian translation was “Careful, or we’ll be in the shit!” ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2026, 5:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983/14 "2026-04-03T05:15:34Z")
> [@terentii](#): > > A skilled translator sticks to the style in which a work is written. I read a fair amount of English-translated (often fan-translated) manga, and notice when recent slang terms start showing up in tranlations, such as an animal described as “smol”, or someone’s actions as “sus”. It often seems to be questionable to me because some of the slang terms have such short half-lives that the transition will become quickly dated. ---
**Author:** ![Tusculan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ecd19e/32.png) [@Tusculan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tusculan)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2026, 5:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983/15 "2026-04-03T05:33:07Z")
Subtitles vary, but on the whole I think the translators do a fair job (not the producers though). My pet peeve is translation of episode titles in streaming services. That is usually horrible. It is probably AI translated as the title lacks context so the AI takes a literal meaning that is clearly wrong in the context of the show, or misses an obvious pun. ---
**Author:** ![Musicat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/musicat/32/20189_2.png) [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2026, 3:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983/16 "2026-04-03T15:36:41Z")
These translations are NOT done by human editors or speakers, but computers. They are only as good as the computer program. Credit or blame should be directed at the programmer, not the “actor”. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2026, 3:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983/17 "2026-04-03T15:42:02Z")
I’ve definitively seen mistakes and missed double meanings and incorrectly parsed words, but, for the most part, they’ve been fine. One of my best friends was a Hungarian-English translator and among the many decisions you have to make in creating a translation, one that’s sometimes overlooked for subtitles is human reading speed. And you see this in same-language subtitles, too. You can’t always transcribe or translate every word as it would be impossible for the viewer to keep up in their reading, so sometimes sentences have to be condensed without losing meaning. ---
**Author:** ![Mighty\_Mouse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mighty_mouse/32/7776_2.png) [@Mighty\_Mouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mighty_Mouse)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2026, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983/18 "2026-04-03T15:45:02Z")
Interesting perspective that I had not thought about. ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2026, 4:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983/19 "2026-04-03T16:00:40Z")
I’ve worked with translators on a number of projects. One problem that kept coming up was that the translator would speak a different dialect or style than my client, and they’d end up arguing about which one was more appropriate for the audience. My favorite example was when the translator asked my German client if he’d learned grammar in 1946, because of his stilted manner of speaking. > [@Tusculan](#): > > My pet peeve is translation of episode titles in streaming services. That is usually horrible. Sometimes more horrible than others [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/iQ0XRXaxTWM/maxresdefault.jpg "Police Squad! Season 1 Opening and Closing Credits and Theme Song") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQ0XRXaxTWM&t=53) ---
**Author:** ![Pardel-Lux](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pardel-lux/32/20182_2.png) [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2026, 5:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983/20 "2026-04-03T17:14:50Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > among the many decisions you have to make in creating a translation, one that’s sometimes overlooked for subtitles is human reading speed. And you see this in same-language subtitles, too. It is not only the reading speed, but the space assigned for subtitles. Letters are big or you won’t be able to read the subtitle in a small screen. This was particularly noticeable to me when I lived in Brussels. Movies are subtitled there in French and in Flemish, one language above the other both in movie theaters and on TV. Giving each langauge two lines of text makes for four lines, that obscures one third of the picture. > [@DPRK](#): > > a good translation is not necessarily word for word. Indeed not. I would go so far and claim that it not only is not “not necessarily”, but seldom word for word. > [@terentii](#): > > Translating is a skill that takes years to acquire, and you never stop trying to improve it. I’ve seen very few translations produced by either AI or humans hired to write them that impressed me. Wholeheartedly seconded. > [@terentii](#): > > Some of the Russian translations I’ve heard bear no resemblance whatsoever to the English dialogue. That happens in all languages. Even the titles of the movies can be completely different, the producer decides and nobody knows why. For instance: High Noon (English original) - Zwölf Uhr Mittags (German version) - **[Solo ante el peligro](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Noon)** (Spanish version) - A la hora señalada (South American Spanish version, except in Ecuador. Why Ecuador? No idea.) North By Northwest (English original) - Der unsichtbare Dritte (German version, meaning _the invisible third person_) - Con la muerte en los talones (Spanish version: literally _Death at his heels_) or Intriga internacional (South American Spanish). This could go on for a long time, and not only for classical movies. An interesting detail - and one I suspect will be met with incredulity in this board - is that sometimes the unfaithful translations are better than the original. This is the case for the German version of Life of Brian, which has some puns that are better than the original. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bilinguals-do-tv-producers-do-a-good-job-of-translating/1028983.md?page=2)