I was watching “A Bridge Too Far” a few days ago and noticed that none of the German or Dutch was subtitled, I had to hit the subtitle button on my remote to get an English translation of what they were saying. This meant there wasn’t a way for me to get subtitles for only the foreign language parts and keep the English subtitles. What’s also odd is that there’s one or two scenes where there are English subtitles for the foreign languages and these are plainly seen in bold white letters directly on the screen, as opposed to having to rely on the remote.
So does this mean during theatrical screenings of “A Bridge Too Far” the quite extensive German and Dutch conversations were just untranslated and you had to just guess from context what they were saying? I’ve noticed a lot of films from that era do this but it makes it confusing why they would allow so much dialog to be missed by the English only speaking audiences.
Subtitles used to be burned into the film, but that’s not always the way it’s done anymore, as digital projection, streaming, or bluray allows for a separate text file to be used instead. That’s faster and easier to edit for different languages than making multiple versions of the movie. That may go towards explaining what you’re seeing (which I admit I can’t quite follow from your description).
It took me a few read-throughs to get it, but the gist seems to be that the print of Bridge Too Far has no subtitles for the English language action and much of the German and Dutch spoken in the movie, only selected bits. Asuka had to switch on the DVD subtitles to find out what the Germans were saying.
Without specific reference to that movie, which is considered a pretty classy effort, British post-WW2 audiences had a steady diet of German-accented English [‘Cherman’ as I’ve heard it called] with a fairly solid repertoire of ‘achtungs!’ ‘gott in himmel’, ‘schnell, schnell’ and so on thrown into the hundreds of war movies that came out for the next 30 years. The combination of that great familiarity with the German language and an aversion to having to read instead of watching may have compelled the director to limit subtitling to the minimum necessary.
We are used to subtitling now, but I think most English language viewers found it a novelty to have to watch a film AND read at the same time. That sort of malarky was what foreigners were expected to do.