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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

Netflix to their credit does let you switch audio language and subtitling to any version they have available for the most part as far as I can tell (with some hilarious results, as for some shows the dubbing and subtitling does not always match well - my son noticed this with anime shows where the English audio and subtitles often say entirely different things)

Though I also wish they'd let me set better defaults. They let you give a list of languages you prefer, but that's too simplistic. E.g. I'd prefer to always get original audio, but subtitles matching the audio in a handful of languages I know well enough to follow if I can read but not only by audio, and falling back to English.

Instead you need to check for each series what is available, or set it broad and change it per program accordingly.

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Sadly depending on which country you're in, some shows on Netflix won't have all the audio/subtitles available. No idea if this is Netflix's fault or yet another unfortunate result of copyright hell.

I’ve found that with the plugin https://languagelearningwithnetflix.com/ I tend to get a longer list of options both for audio and subtitles. It also let’s you do fun stuff like displaying two sets of subtitles simultaneously—although that didn’t really work for my brain.

+1 for LLWN! Fantastic Chrome extension, especially for language learning. They also have one for YouTube.

However, the language options offered beyond those already provided by Netflix are machine translated. This is good enough to follow along or fill in gaps in your knowledge of the officially subtitled language, but is a subpar representation of the program.

Globalization for Me and Not for Thee, S36E571

This happens fairly often on German Netflix. When the program's language is neither German nor English, often there are no English subtitles available.

International licensing is obviously complicated, so it's hard to say whose "fault" it is, but my suspicion is that some rights owners will only license the service to use the local language to prevent end users doing digital geo-arbitrage.

For example, the Swedish series "The Bridge" is available on German Netflix, and the trailer has English subtitles, but the actual episodes only offer German subs. AFAICT in the US market this show is only available for streaming as a purchase from Amazon.

> for some shows the dubbing and subtitling does not always match well

It is very common for languages other than English. I'd say most Netflix content has the French audio and subtitles not matching each other. They have the same meaning but not the same wording.

Give us up the bomb!

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