Basic Trope: The subtitles have no idea what characters are saying.
- Straight: Whenever Alice speaks, the subtitles say some variation of "What is she saying?!"
- Exaggerated: The subtitles can hardly ever understand anything that anyone says, and hardly make an effort to keep up.
- Downplayed: The subtitles make a few spelling/grammar errors, but are otherwise fairly correct.
- Justified:
- Alice is genuinely difficult to understand, whether it's because she doesn't speak the same language as the subtitler, or she does but is incomprehensible.
- Alice is in a crowded room, where a dozen conversations are happening, the subtitler simply can't focus on the conversation Alice is part of.
EG: "Yes, I know wha-…" "…-soline and if we're headed tha-…" "…-ts true, unless you place a BRNZ to 89FF before the LDA X…" - Inverted: Everyone is Speaking Simlish, but the subtitles are very clear at all times.
- Subverted: Alice decides to talk more clearly when it becomes evident that nobody understands her.
- Double Subverted: The subtitles are now trying to translate it to her usual incoherency.
- Parodied:
- The subtitles are constantly replacing all dialogue with sentences like "What is this person saying?" and various question marks, and the characters have Medium Awareness and try to speak clearly so that the subtitles can understand them... only for the subtitles to still have no idea, leading to the characters leaving in frustration.
- Alice speaks with an accent but is otherwise perfectly coherent, yet the subtitles still read "What is this person saying?"
- Zig-Zagged: ???
- Averted:
- There are no subtitles.
- Subtitles are done properly.
- Enforced:
- The real-life subtitler really had no idea what the characters were saying. The subtitler's confusion was likely either a deliberate case of Throw It In!, or a placeholder line that accidentally made it in.
- Rule of Funny
- It's a Translation Convention for Bob's lacking understanding of the language Alice speaks.
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: Alice goes on a rant with the subtitles saying some vacation of "You don't want to know what she's saying here."
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
Go back to (I don't know what the hell they said here).
