Subtitles & Languages

[Sonicmint]

Has anyone ever wondered who or what decides which subtitles and language tracks appear on DVD's?

One disc might have a French and Turkish track, while another might have German and Spanish. Do you think they research the target audience of the film, or just throw in a pick'n'mix?

This has always baffled me!

[Michael Brooke]

It depends on who's licenced that particular disc for distribution, and how many countries they plan to distribute it in.

Patterns do emerge if you look at particular labels and regions - for instance, most American and Canadian discs only offer English, French and Spanish options because there's not much call for anything else, whereas European discs are a fair bit more eclectic. Paramount and Columbia seem to lead the way in terms of the sheer quantity of language options (<I>Bram Stoker's Dracula</I> has nineteen!), because they seem to distribute their discs as widely as possible, whereas Warner Bros seem to divide their discs up amongst sub-regions in Europe.

The Russian Cinema Council seem determined to make their discs as accessible as possible - typically, they'll offer soundtracks in English, French and Russian and subtitles in every major European language plus Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese. The discs aren't region-coded either, making them even more universally compatible.

Censorship also plays a part - distributors want to achieve maximum economy of scale, but they also want to make sure that the discs are appropriate for each territory. If a film has to be BBFC-snipped, that disc might well only be distributed in a relatively small number of other territories, which would limit the language options.

And sometimes deals can <U>prevent</U> particular language options appearing on a disc - for instance, Artificial Eye seem to have made a pact with MK2 that the latter wouldn't put English subtitles on their French editions of the <I>Three Colours</I> trilogy, forcing English speakers to buy the otherwise identical Artificial Eye discs. Something similar seems to have happened with <I>Amelie</I> - again, it may well be the case that Momentum would only buy the UK rights if the French rights holders didn't put English subtitles on their discs.

[Sonicmint]

Your last point was interesting, I never thought about it that way before. I would of brought Amelie R2 French edition if it had English subs on it, but it didn't so that means I'll be buying the Momentom edition.

[StuBruise]

A similar thing happened with the R3 release of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; it was the first DVD to be released (it was still showing in the UK at the time), with English subs and dub as one of the language options, but when the distributor (Columbia Tri Star, I think) realised that so many people were importing the R3 they reissued it with the English-language options removed (since they were the distributors for all regions of CTHD). I believe they then reissued it again with the English options reinstated once it had been released in other regions.

~~stu