For example, whenever I watch an American movie with Japanese subtitles: the translation kind of sucks since there are words translated literally word by word making zero sense or lack of taking account of visual context from a scene. Depends on who translated the dialog, it could be that translators didn’t watch the movie or understand the context in specific scenes.
I recall watching Clear & Present Danger (Harrison Ford) with JP sub, there was a piece of dialog where the commander of a special forces unit gave the orders on planting explosives in which he ordered them to “cook it” basically implying on detonating the trigger but the subtitles translated this as 料理しろ which is incorrect when you account the scene’s context.
Whether you speak German, French, Spanish or etc. are the translated subtitles crap when it comes to movies where colloquialisms (slang), jokes (humor) or wordplay (puns) are thrown into the mix while listening to the original English dub? It’s because subtitles only convey a message but can miss nuances from spoken dialog via the source language.
The French don’t do subtitles, they dub everything.
It’s horrible.
No wonder why English proficiency in France is bad despite being the most visited country.
My guess is that it’s because French is comparatively-widely-spoken relative to most other languages in Europe.
The benefits of speaking a language increase the more people who can speak it — it gives you access to more people out there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers
According to this, as of 2026, there are about 1,493 million people in the world who can speak English.
There are about 334 million people in the world who can speak French. That’s second only to Spanish among European languages behind English.
So if you already know French, learning English will give you access to something like 4.4 times as many people as you could otherwise communicate with.
Contrast that with, say, Icelandic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_language
An Icelandic speaker picking up English gives them access to about 3,828 times as many people. That’s a a lot more content you have access to, people you can communicate with, etc. The payoff to an Icelandic speaker from picking up and using English is considerably larger than the payoff to a French speaker; they’ve got more incentive to be able to use it well.
Luckily movie theatres in Switzerland and Belgium regularly show foreign movies with original soundtrack and French subtitles for all who prefer it that way.
Belgium shows films with TWO subtitle tracks though. Dutch and French. Takes up like half the screen 🫠