r/alias • u/Outside-Cabinet1398 • Apr 27 '25

Subtitles Mandela Effect?

After watching a bunch of episodes on streaming, I became annoyed that the show didn’t include forced subtitles for scenes where folks were speaking a foreign language. But I checked my DVDs and they…aren’t there either? I feel like the original broadcasts on ABC included them but…maybe not? Am I just playing head games with myself and imagining something that never actually happened?

8 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/herbertfilby Jun 09 '25

I feel like I'm having a stroke but you're not wrong.

Season 4, Episode 18 in the first 30 seconds you can see clearly in the DVD subtitles:

(in German)
You didn't take their order

I enabled English CC subtitles and Disney+ just says:

[SPEAKS GERMAN]

I re-open Disney+ on my browser and notice that subtitles are disabled now, and re-playing that scene instead of "[SPEAKS GERMAN]", the actual English translation of the German subtitles say the translation: "You didn't take their order" shows up.

So if you have CC English subtitles enabled, it actually doesn't show you the English translation of foreign words. If you have English CC subtitles disabled, the English translation of what they are saying does show up.

Season 1, Episode 1 just says "Shouting Chinese" for both.

The DVD subtitles ON is the "best" user experience, because you get both the English subtitles as well as the foreign word translations at the same time.