I reviewed Let the Right One In on Blu-ray over a week ago, and what has just come out is that Magnolia dropped a different subtitle track on us than was on the theatrical version.
I only watched the film once before the DVD release, back at Fantastic Fest. I never had a screener that I re-watched multiple times. I just spent a lunch hour re-re-watching most of the film, and it is definitely a different interpretation of what I raved over in September.
It's my bad for not catching this, but what bothers me the most is that when I went through watching the film for review, I didn't even pick up on the major changes. The distance of roughly five months did that for me. I did notice it was different, but this is nothing new on non-English films. Routinely, the home video translation is different (more often worse) than the theatrical edition.
The original subtitle track is usually done in the country of origin, and just as most foreign education systems, their translators are better than ours in the U.S. Of course, when it comes time to pay people, things like subtitles and music and so on are licensed separately for home video than theatrical or broadcast.
This is why you find the Married...With Children DVDs don't feature "Love And Marriage" like the syndicated re-runs do. This is also why imported east Asian releases generally feature better translations than the eventually-released U.S. discs.
What I'm about to theorize is entirely anecdotal based on prior experience, and is not based on any sort of official confirmation. I don't think anyone's going to get anything but radio silence from asking Magnolia what's going on.
Rather than pay residuals or a lump license fee to the original foreign studio, what Magnolia has done is business as usual. They paid a domestic (U.S.) vendor to re-do the translation on the cheap. Sony does this, WB does this, [insert studio here] does this.
So that there is no challenge of plagiarism, the new translation has to be distinct from the original. If it's too close, then there's justification for a lawsuit. I don't defend this practice, I'm just saying it's how things are done. I've been screaming into the void about this for years on Spanish and Chinese movies that have horrible translations.
The only way people will ever be at peace on the subtitle fidelity issue is if Blu-ray developers leverage BD-Live for something useful, instead of gimmicky features no one is using. You can currently record your own commentary track on BD-Live, why not allow people to put their own subs on whatever they want?
Anime importers have done their own subtitles for a couple decades now, with much cruder tools. The tech is there, use it for a constructive purpose. Don't like the subtitle track that came with a disc? Download one. Make your own. Users could trade trivia tracks or swap ones that are badly translated on purpose.
If the studios want people to buy their product, they need to think beyond the box, or U.S. region copies will sit on the shelves. The die-hards will spend more money and import exactly the product they want from overseas. Amazon, YesAsia, and so on will reap the hefty profits.
This now has me wondering what might have been changed in the domestic release of Chocolate, also from Magnolia.