My hearing is just poor enough that I usually turn the subtitles on when I play a DVD; I could mostly do without the help, but it’s good to have when someone mumbles. It’s often clear that whoever made the subtitles did not have access to the script. A phrase in a foreign language almost always shows up as “[speaking foreign language]” (or, if we’re lucky, “[Speaking Italian]”).

So it’s a pleasant surprise that the subtitles of Schindler’s List are in English, German, Polish, Yiddish and Hebrew — though the Polish diacritics are missing, and the transliterations of Hebrew and Yiddish appear to be nonstandard.