Weird subtitles
The league of extraordinary subtitles remembered me of some weird subtitling I once saw on a divx version of The butterfly effect.
The divx itself was of excellent quality, but the Dutch subtitles that came with it (from somewhere else?) were apparently produced but some l33t (NOT) kiddie. It was full of childish, obviously Dutch (i.e. not Flemish) slang. And the best part was, whenever the actors had some important, fast conversation, one or two sentences just never appeared. Apparently too complex to comprehend for our sharing subtitler. [Not that it was annoying; those who understand English have no problem figuring out what's going on, and the others never know they're missing something.]
Now of course this would never have happened if the movie was already released on DVD in Dutch — those are perfect sources for both the video material and subtitles. The interesting thing about it is that apparently, somewhere there is a community of people that prides itself in producing subtitles for each other. They may be linked to the community that actually rips and distributes these movie copies, but not necessarily so.
While I feel making and distributing your own subtitles is a lot less close to ’stealing’ than copying a whole movie verbatim, this practice is still completely illegal. Even while the produced subtitles are copyrighted by the translator, he’s still violating the copyright on the movie itself. That’s because making a translation is technically creating a derived work, and you cannot do that without the original copyright holder’s permission.
At least, not unless it’s CC‘ed 