No Prime Video Audio Language Choices

There’s some good content on Prime Video and since our ISP offered it to us at a very cheap rate, we signed up some months ago. However, most of the shows have Spanish titles because of where we live, so I can accept that. But, some films are dubbed into Spanish with zero options for changing the spoken language. One good example is The Children Act with Emma Thompson and Stanley Tucci, which in Spanish is translated to Un Acto de Esperanza, which would be loosely translated to English as A Leap Of Faith, but that’s by the by. The really irksome fact is that there are no subtitles and the audio is dubbed into Spanish whether you like it or not – this cannot be changed. On the other hand, The Dinner (2017), or La Cena in Spanish, we have a choice of English or Spanish languages and Spanish subtitles.

Well, that’s all fine and dandy but there’s no consistency from one film to another and although I may live in a Spanish-speaking country, Amazon really doesn’t need to presume that my native language is Spanish. I may be on a long-term work contract or simply visiting. Naturally, I can well understand tailoring a streaming service geographically, but we live in an interconnected, multicultural world. Even my wife, who is Argentine, prefers the original language and in our case, we want English. Having looked into ways to fix this, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no fix and some films appear to be hard-coded/dubbed into another language, perhaps even for licensing agreements, who knows? But I’m not alone with this weird language issue because other users in Germany and even Australia are facing a similar problem, as can be seen in this Amazon Forum.

The only time I will watch a film with dubbed audio is perhaps if it’s in a language that I could never understand and even then it loses some of the important nuances that the original actors bring to their roles.

Borgen, on Netflix, is a great example where a dubbed language really works, because I don’t know many people outside Denmark who speak Danish (with all due respect to Danes) and the voice actors get it just right for each character.

But then Netflix has perfected its presentation with numerous audio and subtitle options and I’ve never come across a film on Netflix where you can’t change the audio.

As you can see from the above screenshot, Netflix offers a plethora of audio options, unrivalled by other streamers, in my opinion.

Back to Prime Video, it appears that it’s either bugged or clumsily put together. Only last night I was watching Fear The Walking Dead and Spanish subtitles mysteriously appeared onscreen. I then went to deactivate them (again), saw that were already OFF, and started watching again, only to find subtitles in both Spanish and German superimposed over each other, which was very distracting.

Still, at least Prime Video gives you a description of the show you’re about to watch, with some streamers not even doing that, and X-Ray, a feature that gives you information on each actor is quite cool. Anyway, if I come up with a solution for Prime Video’s weird behaviour, I’ll report back.

—