I’ve seen memes by upset conservatives posting pretty nasty translations of some of Bad Bunny’s lyrics. I don’t know if those are really his lyrics, or if the translations or accurate, or what have you. And that’s not even what I’m asking anyway. What I’m asking is, regardless of what his recorded lyrics do or don’t say, I’m asking about what he said at the Super Bowl. Since I don’t understand spoken Spanish much at all (unless it’s children on Sesame Street), I’ve no clue. So did he, or did he not, put on a show that wouldn’t make it past the censors if it were in English?
FWIW, my only complaint about the Halftime Show is that, at points, Bad Bunny’s delivery sounded like he was …. kind of tired, I guess.
I don’t think Spanish is a hermetic secret code that network standards and practices would be unable to decrypt, so I don’t think the idea that Bad Bunny was sending out a private message passes the laugh test.
“In February 2026, U.S. Representative Andy Ogles (TN-05) requested a congressional inquiry into the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show featuring Bad Bunny. The request, directed at the Energy and Commerce Committee, cites concerns over the performance’s content, which critics deemed vulgar, following the show aired on NBC.”
So at least one Congresscritter apparently believes so. Ironically, Alexandira Ocasio Cortez could probably translate them pretty easily, were someone to ask.
I noticed this during his Super Bowl performance. He started singing in Spanish, and because I had closed captions on, like I usually do, they printed his lyrics in Spanish. No translations were offered, even though they could have easily translated his lyrics before the performance. I wonder if this was done intentionally, because I would guess that at least 80% of the audience watching, like me, had no idea what he was singing about. It could have been inappropriate lyrics, but how would I know? I guess I expected an English translation in the closed captions, but that’s just me.
It was a live performance of a medley of songs. It’s not like he’s submitting a list of songs, along with which verses he’s singing from each, to the network for subtitling purposes. It’s all done live.
If you are a hearing person, the captions are not for you. They are for Deaf people watching the show. They are meant to give Deaf people as close an experience as possible to the one available to hearing people, and that means, if you know Spanish, you understand, and if you don’t, then you don’t.
Many pre-recorded programs may offer several different options for captioning to a viewer, including different languages as well as a straight captioning of the dialog and sounds as shown in the original program and its original language for the hearing-impaired.
Offering captioning in a different language likely would have been challenging to do in a live broadcast, and as noted, isn’t the primary purpose for closed captioning anyway.
Almost undoubtedly; pretty much all network television programming now features closed captioning, including live sports programming – but, again, that captioning is usually done in the same language as is being used in the broadcast.
I watch NFL games on live network TV with my father, who is hearing-impaired, and always uses closed-captioning. Transcribing captioning on a live broadcast isn’t perfect, and it can be amusing (and frustrating, for my dad) to see some of the errors that get made. It would not surprise me if AI is increasingly being used for generating live captioning, which might cut down on the errors (or might not).
Not speaking Spanish, I’ll go on faith that this link shows the original translation. But short version is that he mumbled or skipped over offensive lyrics. Snopes
