In many European countries, adding subtitles in a foreign movie in the native tongue of their residents is a standard norm. Experts who devised this system many years ago said that this would help the masses get to know a second language, by creating associations between the words and the text. But a new investigation comes to disprove these claims, and to show that, in fact, it may be counter-productive to display the subtitles in the language of the respective country, e! Science News reports.

The best solution would be to display the subtitles in the same language as the original movie, which would be of much greater use to those trying to understand the language that is being used in the film. The new international study was led by Holger Mitterer from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in Germany, and MPI / Radboud University Nijmegen expert James McQueen. Full details of the find can be found in the latest issue of the open-access scientific journal PLoS ONE.

In experiments conducted on Dutch students, it was demonstrated that all participants were able to understand Scottish and Australian English a lot better after watching 25 minutes of video footage with the relevant subtitles, rather than watching the translation in their own language. Naturally, these conclusions only apply to those who know at least a little bit of English, but especially those who have English as their second language. In the same study, students who saw Dutch subtitles did not exhibit any increased abilities of recognizing the foreign English accents.

In the case of the English language, knowing what word was uttered is the key element. A subtitle is able to provide a viewer with just that. They can then associate a certain set of sounds that does not necessarily resemble the correctly spoken word, with the word. This is the main mechanism that increases people's understanding of a second language, without the need for translations into their own languages. Additionally, the Dutch researchers also found that students who looked at movie excerpts with Dutch translations were much more likely to use semantic (meaning-based) information from Dutch, rather than English.