The ONLY time it makes sense is if the show is taking the POV of a character who can’t understand what’s being said. But if it’s just regular dialogue it should be translated with [In Language], or captioned in the original language.
Another time is if it’s a live event and not a language expected to be spoken there. Like if someone extemporaneously said something. It’s inexcusable that you get things like SNL sketches fully written (and cue-carded) in Spanish where the live captions are “[speaking global language]”.
And I mean specifically for the live captions which must be quickly typed on specialized stenographic keyboards. Any recorded playback should have an accurate caption
We honestly hate it whenever this is in the captions. It's so fucking annoying. We actually saw an incredibly stupid variant of it (as in, worse-than-usual-stupid) where there were captions for what the person was saying on the screen, but the youtube captions just said [speaking foreign language].
As a (former) transcriber I can confirm this. The [SPEAKING [LANGUAGE]] used to be placeholder text, after which a transcriber who understood that language would be hired to transcribe those sections and a translator to provide English (or whichever target langauge) versions.
Production companies stopped doing that and placeholder text became caption. Next they automated most transcription/translation altogether and often they don't even hire humans to check/edit, or outsource that to non-native workers on exploitation wages in places with few/no worker protections.
Haha! My personal bugbear is the use of the word "chattering" for any language other than English. It's so utterly dismissive. Would it be so hard to write "talking"???
In some cases words like “chattering” or “murmuring” in subtitles are used to describe indistinct crowd noises (what’s known in sound design as “walla”), but there are times I see it and I’m like “they’re clearly having a conversation in Arabic, not ‘chattering’.”
If there's a way to do language support catastrophically wrong, Netflix is doing it RIGHT NOW. I hope it's mostly machine-generated because I feel so badly for anyone who is trying to do a good job for them and having them turn it into junk.
Comments
My friends, that weird projector that plays sound but doesn't project anything? That's a reel-to-reel tape recorder.
It's crappy as hell that they're not.
DUUUH.
So they’d keep you on. 😉