Why don't subtitles match dubbing?

The comments, however, are not translated! ■ AD: 👨‍💻 NordVPN's best deal is here: nordvpn.com/tomscott - with a 30-day money-back guarante

Anyone else think Tom is just going for 600% watch time by encouraging everyone to watch the video in every language?

Love the part where Tom praises the Japanese VO and the actual VO has to effect giving glowing praise to himself.

A reminder that speaking two languages and being a translator are two different skills

My favorite example of localized puns is for a Canadian generic cheese spread. It's named "Cheese-tastic!" in English, and translated into the far superior "Fromidable!" in French.

I'm an American who watches a Norwegian show which became popular in multiple countries thanks to a dedicated fanbase who translated the show themselves. I remember one case where there was a pun based joke that they knew wouldn't work in English so the subtitles said "bread based pun" "bread pun continues."

As someone with Auditory Processing Disorder, I cannot thank you and the crew enough for doing proper subtitles for all of your videos, every single time.

As a Czech person, the part where the Have it! is dubbed to Hindi, it sounded like he's saying Yes, jebat! in Czech, literally meaning Yes, f* it! Made me laugh real hard

Translator here, I worked with Tom on translations for a previous video. I also do voiceovers and translate subtitles. Both dubbing and subtitling is an art in itself, you have a lot of restrictions to consider in order to create a clean product.

I have been a Turkish subtitle translator for 10 years and I don't think there's a single other source on the internet as accurate as your 8 minute video in describing this issue. You've explained the challenges of subtitle and dubbing translation perfectly. Well done Tom!

As a deaf person, I want to thank the person who does the subtitles for this channel. I run my own channel and know how frustrating they are to add and how tempting it is to tick “auto captions” but know that they are so appreciated. Auto subtitles are the bane of my life and I’m sure many people don’t realise how awful they are if you can’t hear, yes the mistakes they make can be funny but not helpful when you can’t work out what it’s meant to read. I’m ‘lucky’ in that I went deaf as an adult, so know what words sound like and so can read the mistake in my head and work out from the context what it’s meant to read, though this still doesn’t work a lot of the time. Deaf people who have always been deaf, can’t even do this. Also shocking in 2023, is the number of shows that don’t have subtitles. Even more annoying when it’s on catch up and had them when shown ‘live’ on tv. Also very appreciative to the people who add subtitles in real time to live shows, a job many I bet have never given a second thought to.

I’m a professional translator in French German and English but I must say, that pun at 4:54 in French was BRILLIANT. Well played to the French translators!

There's a French comedy film called Bienvenue Chez Les Ch'Tis that features the best job of English subtitling I've ever seen/heard. To describe as succinctly as I can: several scenes in the movie turn on misunderstandings of pronunciation and accent between people from different regions of France. The subtitlers (or maybe the scriptwriter) re-scripted these scenes in English using new differently-pronounced words and speech - e.g., chien versus sien became fish versus office pronounced as "offish". They did this WHILE keeping all the jokes functionally intact AND maintaining the comic timing AND keeping the lip-syncing more or less true. Somebody really "laid out" to make that movie as funny as it could be for the broadest possible audience.

Translation is art. Apart from the usual joke and idiom being the most difficult to translate, particularly across Eastern and Western cultures, squeezing sentences into particular duration while keeping the full meaning is just insane. Props to all the translators in the world!

as a deaf person, i thank you SO much for all of your work

I understand the constraints, but i do wish we had an option to get subtitles that actually follow the dubbing because I set them to the same language as the dub. When the two don't match as i read along, it get really hard to follow both at the same time. And it's incredibly powerful to learn the language.

It was a hard (though fun) challenge to work on this project, but it turned out to be even more satisfying now that I can see the results and the good reception it is having. What a pleasure to be part of this. ❤

When Tom mentioned that there were dubs in other languages available, I switched to the French dub out of curiosity. I am currently experiencing an existential crisis. Also I have a huge amount of respect and admiration for translators who go to the effort to translate jokes effectively into other languages. That, in my opinion, must be one of the highest levels of comedic genius. And let's not forget dubbing actors who randomly just absolutely knock it out of the park. Edit: As a native English-speaking Australian, I didn't even have a clue what "have it" means until Tom explained it. Ah, the wonders of dialects.

To be honest, the translation teams did a great job subtitling and dubbing Tom Scott's videos to different languages. Seriously.

At 6:56, "have it" translated to "ये बात" (ye baat) makes perfect sense. That phrase also doesn't really mean anything in Hindi either, but it is used in a similar manner as the English phrase. Great work by the translation team!