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In my country (Sweden) subtitles are the norm for imported content, with most of that content being in English. I believe that reading the Swedish subtitles an

In my country (Sweden) subtitles are the norm for imported content, with most of that content being in English. I believe that reading the Swedish subtitles and hearing the English words simultaneously have played a large role in helping Swedes to learn English. However, it does help a lot that the grammar of Swedish and English is relatively similar. I have been trying to use watching anime to get better at Japanese, and the different word-order and clause-order in the spoken Japanese to the subtitles have often tripped me up — especially when longer sentences have got broken up into multiple subtitles.

webmaven 5y ago
> In my country (Sweden) subtitles are the norm for imported content, with most of that content being in English. That was the norm as I was growing up in Israel, with the exception being children's programming (usually animation) that was dubbed. The dubbing was usually quite good, and done by actors prominent in children's programming. OTOH, being bilingual myself, the poor translation of subtitles was constantly driving me up the wall. I just couldn't ignore the mismatch between the dialog in English and the subtitles in Hebrew, but the rest of my family wouldn't agree to let me cover the bottom fifth of the screen. Semantically, the translations were generally accurate except in infrequent cases where the translator obviously misheard something or translated a phrase overly literally (more often with non-RP British or Australian English than American), but stylistically, the translation was always bland and "correct" (eg. "sure" and "yeah" and "you bet" would all inevitably be translated as "yes").