DOES IT HAVE TO BE HUMAN? DOES IT HAVE TO BE MINE?

it’s never too early to teach children about the devaluation of labor!

sometimes it's words they don't consider important for some reason but absolutely do affect the meaning and tone. sometimes it's swear words, which is even more insidious - disabled people don't need censorship wtf.

that's a large proportion of what i was talking about. i'm watching US shameless on netflix rn and whoever subtitled this has decided that about a quarter of what the characters say are 'filler words.' the most recent example i can think of, a character is telling another off for reckless behavior and says they could have ended up '[some gruesome illness or injury i don't remember] and hooked up to an IV.'

the reason i remember the 'and hooked up to an IV' part and not the other part? 'and hooked up to an IV' was omitted from the captions, jarring me out of the story. this happens every few lines, and what's omitted is often colorful details like this or speech quirks or other things that give characters character. doing this to a script is like forcing all color films into sepia. you lose a lot, and it misrepresents the overall work.

so no, it's not okay to omit 'filler' words, because i don't fucking trust these people to decide on my behalf which parts of the script i should get access to and which are only available to abled people.

I don't know the details of how subtitling works mechanically but i have seen a post from someone knowledgeable debunking the idea that it's ever actually necessary in practical terms to cut out 'filler' words. from experience i've seen them use multiple lines and leave the subs up longer.