The main complaint about subtitles is that it can be difficult to read and follow the action, and that can subsequently make processing the media you’re consuming more difficult. A corollary complaint is that often subtitled translations will discard more of the actual spoken dialogue you hear in the original language, due to time constraints — humans need to be able to read all the words on the screen before the dialogue moves on. And localization could remove nuances in script translations, so there are concerns about loss of quality and full meaning. For example, a 1978 survey of the practice of subtitling by the British Film Institute found that, on average, a full third of a film’s original dialogue would be discarded through the subtitling process.
