Squid Game is by far the hottest new show of 2021, and even though it seems as if every year there’s a new hit Netflix series everyone is talking about, Squid Game is a bit different in that it’s a South Korean production, meaning English viewers will need to decide between watching with either subtitles or dubbing. 

Recently, there’s been a lot of chatter on social media trying to determine the most accurate translation possible. After some multilingual Twitter investigators viewed the show, they took to the platform to help explain the best way for us to watch. 

The answer? Use “English” subtitles instead of “English [CC]” or dubbing to get the most accurate script translation possible. 

The reason is because “English [CC]”, which of course stands for closed captioning, is designed for viewers who are hard of hearing or entirely deaf. These are generally automatically generated rather than being pre-written manually by a team of Korean-English translators and include extraneous descriptions of characters footsteps, yawns, shrieks, and more. 

The Standard “English” option, on the other hand, is designed on the notion you can hear all the auxiliary details, like when a character’s footsteps can be heard marching offscreen, so those will be excluded from the text. 

As for English dubs, the problem is that while you can still get the general gist of the show, dubbing requires a total script rewrite that must somewhat match the original actor’s lip movements when spoken in the new language. 

This results in a somewhat compromised experience and will most definitely jettison some of the most minute dialogue nuances written in by the original screenwriters.