Streaming, Non-Latin Alphabets, and Subtitles

by Rian

I was trying to watch Wandering Earth on Netflix the other day. I was trying to watch a sci-fi movie where majority of the dialogues are in Chinese. Which Chinese, I have no clue —and yes, your favorite martial arts film may not be in Mandarin. So the subtitles were needed. This is where it gets all hazy and confusing. Korean Subtitles on Netflix app, either on Apple TV or LG Smart TV were largely illegible.

Anyone who is bilingual may be able to add to what I am saying here, but I watch Chinese contents with Korean subtitles. But I prefer to watch Western films with English subtitles. My brain simply fails to understand Chinese in English subtitles or translations. Half of the martial arts terms are missed out on my deaf ears and the other half, which is usually the poetic dialogue, is completely disconnected from my literary background.

Back to Korean subtitles on Netflix app, fortunately the app has begun to support multilingual subtitles. What is bizarre though is its insistence that Netflix (or Apple) knows where all subtitles should belong on the screen; they don’t. Neither of the apps support font selections; they use the system default fonts. But the font is not the issue. Its size and location are the issue. The subtitles generated from these apps don’t have size options; and when they do, it’s often too big it covers the image or too small it’s illegible. And the subtitle is always displayed by the border between the image and the letterbox; it’s not the most ideal places for non-latin characters.

Apple TV is known to enforce its own player API across different streaming apps, so I was under the impression that LG TV’s Netflix app would fare better —I couldn’t have been more wrong. Netflix app has limited subtitle support on either platform, and frankly I think the web version offers a better solution. It’s a food for thought. I read some of the Korean threads pointing fingers at Apple for not supporting Korean more rigorously, —which I agree— and it’s about damn time developers across the world rethink how the subtitles are done in the first place.