On the IMBD forums I’ve seen a lot of people in favour or American re-makes because they think they’re easier to follow than subtitled movies in the original for them foreign language. There’s also many countries (Most of central and southern Europe) that dub just about everything in another language than their native one. For me as a Swede I have a hard time understanding what they find so difficult about subtitles. Sure in some less developed countries where a large percentage of the population can’t read it’s one thing but when Americans prefer re-makes and French and Germans dubbed movies it’s just silly. Personally my reading skills were good enough to follow subtitles when I was seven and it’s been working well for me ever since.

I think it’s especially silly when people (Americans, it’s always Americans) complain about how it’s hard to follow a movie in a language they don’t understand with subtitles they do understand. Personally I think it’s harder to follow a movie in a language you do understand with subtitles in another language you also understand.

The things is no matter how good the subtitles are not everything can be accurately translated. Take humorous puns like this for example: “What did the grape say when it got stepped on? Nothing – but it let out a little whine”. Translated to Swedish the words “whine” and “wine” have no similarity to each other which means that directly translated the joke no longer makes sense. The usual solution to this is replacing the joke with a similar one. It works but when you understand the spoken English and get the joke it’s a bit annoying reading a completely different joke in the Swedish subtitles. That is what you could call hard to follow. Hearing one thing in one language and reading another in another language. Yet here in Sweden where almost everyone understand English we don’t complain because we’re used to this.

What do I want to say with this? That people who think subtitles makes movies hard to follow should think about how we do it in Sweden and how we manage well despite the fact that most of us understand both the spoken language and the subtitled one. Dubbing makes movies look weird and re-makes… well isn’t that just extremely unnecessary? Just read the damn subtitles.