> subtitles are needed because people want to have the original audio + text I'm a non-native English speaker, and I like watching English-language content wit

> subtitles are needed because people want to have the original audio + text I'm a non-native English speaker, and I like watching English-language content with closed captioning in the original language. There's often a lot lost in translation, especially on the screen (written content might have different issues), because it's often hard to get the rhythm and timing right without changing the contents in non-trivial ways when the source and target languages are completely different. Since I can understand English fairly fluently and nearly always get the nuance that would be lost in a translated version, I prefer the original language, even for the subtitles. Since I'm not 100 percent, though, having the subtitles or closed captioning usually lowers my cognitive load. It also means I don't have to worry about missing something because of an unfamiliar accent, a very quickly spoken line, or some other random thing.