Summary
In a multicultural educational environment, especially film-related courses where English-speaking students are expected to identify characters by name, participate in discussion and write essays on the subject matter, losing as many as half the letters in someone's name constitutes a technologically imposed handicap.
Body
Diacritics are symbols added above, below or alongside letters to indicate correct pronunciation.
Viewers of films in languages that employ diacritics may notice that some words in the subtitles have missing letters.
The problem arises when software used to generate subtitles simply deletes any letter carrying a diacritical mark.
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This confusing flaw often affects personal names, which generally do not "translate".
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For example: Šaran becomes aran, Šimáček appears as imaek and Čížek gets shortened to iek.
A technologically imposed handicap
In a multicultural educational environment, especially film-related courses where English-speaking students are expected to identify characters by name, participate in discussion and write essays on the subject matter, losing as many as half the letters in someone's name constitutes a technologically imposed handicap.
Subtitle programs vs. Unicode files
This problem is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon because oddly enough, as one online commentator put it, "Most subtitle programs do not work correctly with Unicode files unless the Unicode file is in English."