some things are translated in a way that makes the meaning slightly different but good enough most of the time.

believe it or not fansubs are usually much better ime.

Finnish here.

Since nothing is dubbed, people here understand English quite fluently and only read subtitles occasionally when the speech is unclear. Switch is mostly unconscious.

Mistakes are actually rare and fun when you spot one. It's usually due to translator not being familiar with idiom or proverb. Sometimes they are an interesting reminders how finno-ugric and germanic languages handle things differently.

Only times it can get annoying is when there's something untranslatable like puns or other kind of wordplay. Translator just wings it and pulls something really stupid.

They're usually fine when you have subs in a different language than the audio. Where it gets frustrating is when you're watching something in English audio with english subs and the words in the subtitles differ from the spoken words. It happens especially often when the original Audio language is something other than English. It's awful

For a while I had a side job correcting subtitles that had context mistakes. It was fun and some people would look me up to work for them if they needed something very specific, mostly independent movies and a couple of things for netflix. Now with AI that side gig is no more but the auto generated stuff is pretty terrible.

nah they tend to be fine usually, minor mistakes are actually funny imo

I hate Danish subtitles on English content. Not because they're inherently bad but because it is extremely distracting. English on English is fine but only if it is word for word what they say, otherwise I turn it off and just pay more attention.

Thing is, jokes cannot be translated easily, meanings change, and so on. That makes it so that the translated version isn't carrying the same punch as the original. And I simply don't have the mental capacity to read Danish and listen to English simultaneously (or ignore the subtitles).

And it's like that in reverse too. I've been showing some Danish movies to a foreigner, obviously she needed English subs, which proved to be hard to cancel out for me.

Not usually. The sentences are often different from how I would understand them, but get the general idea in a way that’s easy to digest.

Strangely enough they're usually well made. There are cases where things are translated slightly differentely than you'd expect to get closer to the original meaning in the other language or to save space (cause this is also often a problem). But these differences are interesting in themselves, like you see a different interpretation. In the rare case where it's really bad you can tell without knowing the spoken language.

It varies a lot from movie to movie. Some are very well done, others not so much. Back in the old days they would go as far as pick a new name for a movie just to make some pun work properly when translated. Sometimes references are replaced for others that make more sense in the localized context.

But in general these days the subtitles don't get much attention and they often pick simple/literal translations for everything, while dubs often get a lot more work put on them but also tend to dumb down the content to simplify things for a wider audience.

One English expression that often gets overlooked on Portuguese subtitles and I get really annoyed when I see is "it can't be helped". In Portuguese it feels like you're talking about yourself in third person.

And another, closer to your example, that I have seen used wrong at least two times before. "Screw you" being used in the movie with the meaning of "fuck you" and the subtitle translating it with the word used for tightening a screw.

Even English ones are terrible sometimes, particularly with regional accents. Jamie Dornan was on something I watched and the subs kept showing Puttanesca (the pasta dish) as Put in NASCAR. I tend to keep Spanish subs on to keep up with my Spanish, and they're generally correct in most places.

Unrelated but one thing that infuriates me to no end it that even though most German TV personalities speak English badly (like sub-middle-school badly), they always get perfect subtitles reflecting what they meant to say, but not what they did say.

When you watch a movie in public with native audio and subtitles and you speak or understand the audio language, you'll often hear scattered laughter before the main audience laughs because often the subtitles have a delay for the punchline of a joke, which means that those who already heard the joke laughed at the moment it happened, not a second or more later when the subtitles arrive.

Most of the time the subtitles match the audio, sometimes they change a cultural reference, or infrequently completely get the translation wrong for no apparent reason which can become a new accedental joke all on its own. Then there's weird ones where numbers like someone's age or the time are wrong.

Source: I speak multiple human languages to various degree ... and way too many technology ones. I'm also going deaf, so I have closed captioning on most of the time.

Of course mistakes happen, but I think it's pretty rare so you do notice when it happens.

Have you seen live translations? It's really cool how they keep up. Maybe nowadays it's done with an LLM, but at least back in the day subtitles could be written live if they didn't have an interpreter for the hearing impaired. My guess is it was made with some shorthand-keyboard.

Translators can either go strictly translating the sentences, or change them quite a bit to make a joke, double entendre or clue still work in the context of the movie. The latter can feel jarring if you know both languages but I think are actually the better made translation, because they take the whole piece into consideration and not just the words.

Something I find rather funny is when they translate a title from english to english. For example Miss Congeniality is translated to Miss Undercover, Miss Detective, Miss Agent and Miss Secret Agent in different countries.

My native language is German and I never had a problem with it. But i think compared to Japanese the German language is fairly easy and German is also much more similar to English than Japanese. So not only Translating but also dubbing and subtitles are much easier to do.

Maybe in your example the translators didn't know it better or were underpaid. I also don't know how well the dubbing and subbing to japanese are overall level is. In german the level is quite high.... i was onlynoticing that movies were translated and not origially german when i was like 11-13. (That could also just mean that i was a stupid child, but i think it's the combination between that and the good dubbing)

About the different challenges between subtitles and dubbing i can recommend a Tom Scott video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU9sHwNKc2c

https://renote.net/articles/198647 The epítome of bad Japanese subtitling is Toda Natsuko. My favorite example is from Apollo 13. She didn't understand that "opening" a circuit causes electricity to stop flowing, so she mistranslated it as "turn it on!"