Fair warning: The below is pretty much just me complaining about the lack of proper grammar I witnessed today. You have been warned.
Here’s something you may or may not know about me: I love subtitles. I love them whether what I’m viewing is in English or something foreign. Whenever there is an option for subtitles, I use it. I’m not deaf; I can hear perfectly well, but there’s just something about reading the dialogue that really complements the whole presentation to me (notice my choice of words here, because there’s a purpose that I’ll be getting to).
This is the reason that I’ve loved watching things on Hulu. They manage to subtitle a good deal of their popular shows. Usually, they’re pretty spot-on, other than a few typos and that weird thing where apostrophes are replaced with symbols…
Anyway, I was watching Kitchen Nightmares tonight, and was surprised at how badly they’d subbed it. Completely messing up sentences, leaving words out…various things that were very obviously wrong.
None of that truly bothered me until THIS scene played out:
To put it in context, Chef Ramsey called the guy a “busy idiot.” His brother, trying to placate the busy idiot, attempts to tell him that the phrase is flattering in British English. Sadly, that excuse actually appears to work…but that’s beside the point.
Look at the subtitles. Someone at the closed caption company apparently doesn’t know the difference between compliment and complement (for anyone who is unaware, they do mean completely separate things. Compliment is something that flatters, complement is something that helps to bring completion – so you can see how silly this sounds). I’d let it slide if the word weren’t used like, seven times during this scene, all spelled the wrong way. It was figuratively blinding me from watching the show.
I’m pretty sure there are people that think this is borderline OCD behavior. To help illustrate just how distracting this sort of thing is to me, imagine you’re watching some show set in a specific time in history without electronics, like Game of Thrones. Now imagine that you’re watching, and suddenly, a ringtone starts playing in the show. You think, “why would they have a cellphone on a set like that, then ignore it?” But then the ringtone goes off again, six more times and no one bats an eye. Are you thoroughly distracted from watching now?
Closed caption companies: Hire people that know how to write sentences correctly. Hire people that can write out the sentences exactly as they’re said. Hire people that know the differences between common homonyms.
That is all I ask, really.



































