A woman with hearing impairment always watched movies with foreign language subtitles. This is because the dialogue is displayed on the screen as text.
The trouble came when she went to see the movie “Bullet Train” starring Brad Pitt in theaters. The film features Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada, and there is a scene in which he delivers his lines in Japanese. To her surprise, there were no subtitles for that scene. She had no idea what he was talking about.
When an American film is shown in Japan, English scenes are translated into Japanese with subtitles, but Japanese scenes are not subtitled on the assumption that someone who understands Japanese is watching the film.
She tweeted her disappointment about this on Twitter. Then, ten hours later, the film’s distributor announced that the film would be shown with subtitles for the Japanese dialogue as well.
Many Japanese people feel that in movies, the volume of sound effects is set higher than the dialogue spoken by the actors and that they can hardly hear the dialogue. This will help not only this woman but also many others in their movie-viewing experience.
