Spent $30 on a bluray box set of an obscure 90s mecha series and the subtitles are machine translated garbage

Found this OOP set on ebay from a seller in Japan. Thought I was getting a steal. But the english subs are barely readable. Like sentence structure makes no sense and characters get called wrong names. Had to double check if I accidentally watched a bootleg. Anyone else run into bad subtitle quality on older releases?

3 comments

3 Comments

blair_webb11d ago

Honestly that's brutal. Machine translated subs are the absolute worst.

gavinb9711d ago

Yeah totally agree. I tried watching some foreign film the other day and the machine subs were just Complete nonsense. Kept getting character names wrong and the timing was all off so you'd read a line from like 5 seconds ago while someone is already talking. Honestly ruins the whole experience, you can't get immersed when you're constantly trying to figure out what was actually said.

hannahsingh11d ago

The timing thing gets me every time too honestly. @blair_webb, what gets me even more is when they just translate idioms literally and it makes zero sense in English. Like I watched this movie where a character said "it's raining cats and dogs" in a serious scene and the sub had something totally different from 20 seconds ago that made the whole moment fall flat.