@banefirelord: hmm, this is interesting, and maybe not as simple as it appears at a glance. Do you know what the original Japanese line was? Was it something that wouldn't have sounded anachronistic to 1950s Japanese theater-goers watching a movie set in 1500s Japan? Or was it a similar common idiom in 1950s Japanese that no one in 1500s Japan would've said?
I feel like if I'm the translator writing the captions, and the original line was a 1950s Japanese idiomatic phrase, I probably would've made an effort to use a modern English idiomatic phrase to preserve the intent of Kurosawa and his team, as best as I'm able to understand his intent from the available evidence anyway.
I tend to agree on the use of idioms in translations. Naively, a completely literal translation seems like the best way to do it, but different languages accomplish the same tasks in different ways. You have to try and find a way to convey the same connotative meaning and poetry or the original language if you're translating something.
One thing to be careful of is idioms that too explicitly reference something modern in a historical piece. "Hitting a speed bump" or "Shifting gears" are things that should never happen before the invention of cars.
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