In my internet travels, I go on occasion to sites that have free subtitles to movies to download. These are not torrent sites, although torrents might be one source. The putting up of these subtitles for downloading is not under the auspices of any government, as far as I know. For any one of a very large number of movies, there is a world wide exchange going on here with often hundreds of subtitles in several dozen or more languages.
The movie “Casino Jack” has 345 subtitles in 29 languages. These include 4 in Farsi (Iran’s major language), 9 in Arabic, 1 in Basque, 9 in Slovenian, 6 Vietnamese, 5 Finnish, 5 Bulgarian, 3 in Hebrew, etc. A big grossing movie like Inception has 1,763 subtitles in 42 languages.
The internet is an international net. International relations are being created from “below” at personal, voluntary, and decentralized levels.
I should also at least mention that international cinema is a source of some excellent films, and that these are coming out of more and more countries, and that large numbers are privately financed, produced, and distributed. Americans have never gone for foreign films (see here), however.
5:08 pm on October 6, 2012
