Films and TV shows and more often have subtitles, which are helpful for enjoying muted video, translation, people with hearing impairment, people struggling to understand accents, checking fast unclear dialogue and other reasons. They are important, and sometimes it’s clear when they do something right or wrong.
Maybe we can’t expect them all to be works of art, but there are certainly some easy wins even in the industrial media environment. What do you think?
I love when translators add cultural explanations in fan subs of animes.
This is not an example of that:
Oh, and for some stupid reason professional subs never translate the theme song. Fan subs do that. I used to have a version of Evangelion where it would alternate between the translation and Japanese lyrics in roman letters, that was nice.
This can sometimes be because the lyrics of a song have different licencing considerations to the song itself, and they are legally not entitled to put the lyrics as subtitles.
No such problems for fansub groups! :)