What's really annoying is when you turn on the CC subtitles and someone speaks a foreign language. The on screen subtitle gets covered with an unhelpful "[speaking Japanese]"
That's an artistic choice: the POV character in that scene doesn't speak Japanese, so viewers receive information limited to their perception.
Languages are handled differently in truly multi-lingual media. Watch _Invasion_ for a good example (the first season is amazing, but we didn't care for the second). There, the audience gets subtitles for everything, so viewers often know more than the characters do. There's a beautiful sequence in the desert where two men, unable to understand each other's language, pour out their hearts to each other, and - unwittingly, and across a cultural chasm - share the same hopes and fears.
There's a third way of handling language, which I hardly ever see: the characters on-screen understand each other, but the audience doesn't. The _Star Wars_ by-play between R2-D2 and C3PO is the most accessible example. This is engaging because viewers have to fill in the blanks to infer what one or more of the characters have said.
You might prefer that everything be of the second type, but keep an open mind! The creators probably had a reason for making the choice that they did.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but I'm afraid you badly misunderstood the comment you replied to.
They aren't complaining about closed captions failing to translate foreign speech.
They're complaining about the specific instance where the show/movie has English subtitles for that foreign speech already built in and showing on the screen, and when the closed captions show "[speaking Japanese]" it overlays the translation that the filmmakers intended the viewers to receive, preventing them from experiencing the filmmaker's artistic choice.
The POV character might not speak Japanese, but some viewers without hearing difficulties might, so Japanese-speaking viewers using CC shouldn't be discriminated against. Or the Japanese phrase might be "konnichiwa", which most people would understand. Or it might be a commonly used term, like "Cinco de Mayo". The subtitles shouldn't cop out with [speaking foreign language], but instead put the foreign phrase in the subtitles if it isn't meant to be translated.
I'd argue that if the director decided that the characters should not understand what's being said, then its better if the audience doesn't know either.
For a particular example, it is my understanding that the movie "The Thing" is thoroughly spoiled right at the beginning if you speak Norwegian.
