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Ross : > 5. Difficulty even for native speakers of actually hearing > lyrics in order to translate. I wouldn't mind the odd karaoke line under > songs in English. > 7. Almost no-one speaks or can speak for the audiences who would like > translations. The symptom is scarcely articulated, let alone change > advocated. There are no activists, NGO's, political parties. > At best there is Adrian's philosophical question. An additional point that sprang to my mind, particularly regarding these two points (and still more video/DVD than cinema), is the presence of "English subtitles for the hard of hearing". Which skips the entire "how difficult is the translation job" argument, and centres on what part of the film should be subtitled... If you accept that these should have songs subtitled, then wouldn't "proper" translated sub-titles also include songs... Of course, subtitles for the hard of hearing also include sound effects, and I doubt that many of us would like to see those subtitled... Quick web search reveals... www.yourlocalcinema.com which is a site for cinema sub-titles for the hard of hearing. Quote : "An estimated 5 million people in the UK use subtitles to enjoy films. And although subtitles are the norm on TV, DVD and video, they are NOT available on most cinema releases. Silent movies are still the norm here, but without the old captions that helped to explain the plot." More Ross : > Acting together, these excuses, sentiments, costs, difficulties greatly > reduce the likelihood of song lyric translations. > > The result of these sorts of selection processes is that, almost > unconsciously, film society ends up with a cultural form that is quite alien > to (or, as they say, alienated from) the intentions of filmmakers and > audiences (even if not to/from the distributors). In other words, this > unsubtitled song thing is a symptom of a kind of film-culture unconscious. I also think that most fans of foreign language cinema are relieved to see things getting a release without being remade in English or badly dubbed... Thanking heaven for small mercies and such. i.e. we feel that what we're getting is as close to intentions as we're likely to see (and we hate to complain about the poor subtitles after they've gone to all that trouble to let us have the chance to see their film). At least part of the reason behind this feeling is too much bad dubbing historically, when the technology of sub-titling was less mature. With fewer foreign language features getting released dubbed, and modern technology, maybe the time is coming for quality of sub-titles as an issue - given digital projection, there is presumably no reason that sub-titles couldn't be projected on-the-fly from a different source than the actual feature which must be rather cheaper than getting a subtitled film print made. Wouldn't "better" sub-titles then attract more people to the films... Quote from www.yourlocalcinema.com again : "Of the films that are subtitled, many, including the latest Lord of the Rings and Star Trek films, are 'digitally subtitled only' which means that they are incompatible with 98% of UK cinemas. In fact only 17 cinemas in the UK are capable of screening most of the latest subtitled releases (click below for locations). "These 17 cinemas have been equipped with a new 'access system'. Once a cinema has the subtitle 'files', they can overlay subtitles onto the latest films. They don't need a separate subtitled print. The system can be turned on and off - similar to teletext subtitles on TV, so the screen can be used for non-subtitled shows too. So in fact, yes, digital sub-titling is with us :-) Apparently there are plans afoot for 75 more cinemas to get this access system this year. A little more www.yourlocalcinema.com : "The system can also broadcast audio description, for visually impaired people. The on screen action is described in detail through personal headphones. This feature has no affect on an audience's enjoyment of a film and can be left 'on' all of the time. Every show can be an audio described show." One last comment about www.yourlocalcinema.com is that they have a buttopn to addd your name to a petition to try and get more cinemas doing access screenings. If this leads to a greater acceptance of sub-titles, then it can only be a good thing... I wonder what the cultural norms are for sub-titling in most of Europe. When English is a foreign language, you have a much bigger market for "foreign language" films. Steve