Here’s a free idea for anyone who wants it. I can’t act on this easily but I bet it could be a fun thing to have. I was watching Young Royals (again) recently, and one of the minor plot points in series 1 revolves around the expensive nature of the school. The prices are said in SEK as it’s a Swedish show, which makes sense. However, the English (and other translated) subtitles also quote the price in SEK, which meant I had to do a quick conversion to GBP to understand the magnitude of what was being said.
Without doing that conversion, the scale of the expense would have been lost on me.
I feel, given that much media is now streamed, there could be some sort of an add-in to the subtitling system which could check what currency you pay for the streaming service in, and convert amounts mentioned in shows into that currency automatically. Perhaps even in a parenthesised form, so as to preserve the original as well.
Similarly, series 1 of Young Royals was released in 2021 when the
world had a very different financial outlook, and conversions done now
don’t necessarily reflect that situation. Surely that could be conserved
by telling the add-in to the subtitling system
convert X to Y, amount Z, date A. As a result, the semantic
meaning would be preserved for me as a non-local viewer of the show,
just as it would be to someone who had lived in the country all their
life.
Sadly I don’t have a way of getting someone to implement this, so I’m putting it on here in case anyone who reads this can!
Tagged as: ideas technology thoughts video