Why are so many movie subtitles sub-par?

I weary of lazy subtitling. I shouldn’t even really call it sub-par since I don’t remember ever watching a video with sub-titles as energetically complete as I would prefer. It’s all sub-par. Par must be imagined.

The difficulty or inadvisability of literal translation only goes so far as an excuse. I suppose another rationale must be that the translator or his editorial boss wishes to spare the viewer the necessity of spending too much time reading at the expense of viewing. However, one does like to know what was said, especially if one is trying to make connections between the words of one language and the more-or-less equivalent words of another. Perhaps one can’t directly translate certain idiomatic expresses–but why are cultural and historical allusions also rubbed out, simply because the residents of one country might be less likely to recognize an allusion than the residents of another?

Then there’s the sin of condensing or rewriting. “Don’t move, I know the way,” the girl says to Elliot Gould in “The Silent Partner.” In the Spanish subtitle this becomes “Don’t accompany me.” What, in Spain or Mexico, nobody ever says “Don’t move” or “I know the way”? Would an inordinate amount of time have been lost if the subtitle had given the speaker or student of Spanish a better idea of how the same thing would actually be said in Spanish? Okay, maybe the Spaniards never say “Don’t move,” but don’t they sometimes say “Stay there”? It’s not exactly a congested phrase from Homer or Shakespeare we’re talking about here.