There are several parts of the old PBS miniseries The Story of English which are subtitled.
Yeah, and I’ve seen black and “ethnic” Americans, speaking English, subtitled on television, while Midwestern white folks are not. Kind of offensive, really.
Years back, there was a movie called “Riff Raff” that was released in the USA with subtitles, since the lead characters were supposedly working class Brits whose accents were not readily understood by American audiences.
It’s been about 30 years but I remember seeing a VHS version of “The Harder They Come” (set in Jamaica for the uninformed) where the dialog was subtitled, at least in the beginning. I have no idea if it was like that when it was in the theaters.
I saw the film at a cinema in Australia, and it was subtitled there as well.
British television documentaries featuring interviewees speaking Indian English are often subtitled and it is really irritating. Of course some Indians speak an English that is not immediately comprehensible to speakers of “standard” English. But most of the time it just seems rather patronising.
Incidentally, one programme I saw a bit of subtitled “lakhs of” as “lots of”. I’m not sure if they misheard it, or “translated” it into non-Indian English. I’m not sure what I think about them doing this.
Go, Bigboote!
Too obscure?
I saw that same one or another about the same subject. Truthfully, the subtitles really aren’t about the intelligence of Americans. There are certain Americans I have difficulty understanding because they’re accents are so thick. When I was an undergraduate a classmate was telling me about New York City which he recently returned from visiting.
Classmate: They got coffee Skittles in New York.
Me: I didn’t know they had coffee Skittles.
Classmate: No, coffee Skittles.
Me: Skittles?
Classmate <enunciates his words carefully>: Coffee skills. Skills. They make good coffee.
Me: Oh.
I also knew a Scotsman (one of those true Scotsman I hear about around here) and many of us had a hard time understanding him. His accent combined with his rapid speech meant people had to ask him to repeat himself quite often. Once someone even asked him what his first language was.
They had a sketch on Saturday Night Live when Russell Brand was hosting about a crime drama that was…
“British.”
“Extremely British.”
“I don’t think I heard a single consonant.”
It was called "Don’ You Go Rounin’ Roun’ To Re Ro."
“Time magazine says, ‘Is there a way to turn on subtitles for a movie in English? If so, which button is it?’”
I came into this thread to post a link to that one! Bill Hader, Fred Armisen, and one actual Brit, Russell Brand. Brilliant. What? What? What?
I do remember the re-dubbed GREGORY’S GIRL playing in theaters in the late 80s. I saw it in Boston and the reviewers were amused they had to do that. I have a Scottish-Canadian grandmother with a burr that I was used to and I couldn’t catch all the words either.
I grew up in an Irish neighborhood and didn’t have much trouble with THE COMMITTMENTS and the other two in the trilogy, but the Scottish ones, oy vey.
Took me a while to find this…Rab C. Nesbitt Dole Office - YouTube
Oh, yes, here’s the other one I wanted to find. Subtitled Arab - YouTube
“It’s not Irish, not English… it’s Pikey.”
I have never needed subtitles for any UK movie I have ever seen, but I do tend to watch a good bit of them. Some people are just better with accents than others.
Either that, or I am so used to translating thick Southern US accents on the fly that I can pick up on others as well.
Some English-dialog portions of District 9 were subtitled - I recall the Nigerian gang leader’s accent being especially thick and mostly (to me, at least) incomprehensible.
First one I thought of. The Criterion DVD is subtitled as well, I believe. And necessarily so.
James Brown was in one of the bmw films and was subtitled for almost everything he said.
an American in a short with a bunch of American accented people and he needs to be subtitled.
It was subbed in its first American release, 'cause we don’t understand Strine.
Twin Peaks, for the dwarf-in-the-red-suit parts, was subtitled.
It’s also done for laughs as the subtitles are a prissy paraphrasing of what’s actually being said. Perhaps the director had seen the badly subtitled version of That Sinking Feeling mentioned upthread and wanted to parody it.
There’s a bit in Austin Powers in Goldmember where Austin and his dad are speaking to each other in Cockney Rhyming Slang. They break the Fourth Wall and tell the audience they’re going to use subtitles. At one point the subtitles give up and just put “???” on the screen. 
That near-exact gag was done by Eddie Murphy way back in his SNL days during a mock-commercial for “Buh-Weet Sings!”, an album by his Buckwheat character. The subtitles correctly identified Three Times a Lady (sung as “Fee tibes a maby”) but put up question marks when Murphy rendered an especially mangled version of Bette Davis Eyes, which I wouldn’t even try to transcribe.
To continue this derail, I know a guy from Glasgow who went into a restaurant in the US. He hold up the menu, waves waitress over to his side of the table, tells the woman ‘I’ll just point, because you won’t understand me’.
Waitress: ‘What?’
Back (sort of) on topic, I find it really amusing to watch the news in the US now, as they seem to subtitle anybody with a non-standard accent. Southern? Subs. Nigerian? Subs. British? Subs. Indian? Subs.
Between Aberdeen, Glasgow and Dundee I can now understand anybody. Except people from Hull. What the hell is that?