Author: Alex Marshall / Source: New York Times
Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
If you complain to Netflix, the streaming giant listens. At least it does if you’re Alfonso Cuarón, the Golden Globe-winning director of “Roma.”
In the film, set in Mexico City in the 1970s, the actors speak Mexican Spanish and the indigenous Mixtec language.
For that Spanish, Netflix added subtitles in Castilian, Spain’s main dialect, for the release in that country. On Wednesday, Netflix removed those Castilian subtitles after Cuarón told El País, a Spanish newspaper, that they were “parochial, ignorant and offensive to Spaniards themselves.”Even commonly understood words like “mamá,” for mother, had been translated (in that case to “madre”) as were the words for “get angry” and “you.”
“Gansito,” the name of a Mexican chocolate snack, was perhaps more accidentally changed to “ganchitos,” a cheese puff.
“Something I enjoy most is the color and texture of accents,” Cuarón told El País. “It’s as if Almodóvar needs to be subtitled,” he added, referring to the acclaimed Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar.
Cuarón would not comment for this article, but Bebe Lerner, his representative, said in a telephone interview that Cuarón told Netflix to change the subtitles as soon as he learned of them after an event in New York on Tuesday night.
The only form of subtitles now available for the Spanish dialogue in Spain are closed captions — the form that benefits those who are hard of hearing or deaf. These feature the Mexican-Spanish dialogue in its original form.
(Those closed captions have been available since the film was released there.)Netflix would not answer questions about its use of Castilian for “Roma” or other films and TV shows it buys from Latin America.
The problem was first spotted in December by Jordi Soler, a Mexican author who…
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