If you watched Squid Game in English, did you really watch Squid Game at all?
CBC
From Stranger Things to Tiger King, you've most likely found yourself in a Netflix binge to keep up with what everyone else is watching.
And as audiences stuck at home search for more and more content to binge, the streaming service has begun reaching further afield to build up its content. France's Lupin and Spain's Money Heist — among the platform's most successful titles of all time — have proven audiences are willing to climb what Parasite director Bong Joon-ho dubbed "the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles" for a great series, regardless of its language.
With South Korean drama Squid Game holding down the No. 1 spot in over 90 countries, it seems non-English shows have firmly arrived for English speaking audiences.
But as content subtitled and dubbed by a variety of sources takes its place in the mainstream, it has raised the question — are we all even watching the same thing?
Questions around Squid Game's translation first rose a few weeks after the show premiered. Comedian and Feeling Asian podcast co-host Youngmi Mayer took to Twitter to voice her complaints, saying that much of the closed-caption subtitles were "botched" in their English translation.
"I'm fluent in Korean and I watched Squid Game with English subtitles," Mayer wrote, "and if you don't understand Korean you didn't really watch the same show."
Though Mayer later clarified she was referring specifically to the closed-captions (which are for watchers who are hard of hearing and generally must match the corresponding words spoken on screen — in this case the English dubbed version) rather than English subtitles, she noted that the subtitles are better but "still atrocious."
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