When Alice's flamingo-cum-croquet mallet was translated as a "flamenco," I'd had enough.
Everybody makes mistakes, but whoever was responsible for the error-ridden subtitles nearly ruined my viewing of Alice, Jan Švankmajer's otherwise delightful adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Shoddy subtitles are all too common, and they can completely alter a viewer's understanding of a film. For example, check out these three different translations of the final scene in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. The first veers pretty wildly from the actual dialogue. As for the second, who would ever actually say, in English, "It's a real scumbag"? The last comes close to capturing the spirit of the French, but for me, every one of these versions is unnecessarily distracting. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>