This contribution looks at the Polish subtitles of the film The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001) in order to assess the criteria for quality assessment and their application to audiovisual translation. As a voice-over country, Poland has had little subtitling tradition to date, and only feature films are subtitled for their cinema release. However, recently a new kind of subtitling has developed. With the help of freeware computer programs and the Internet, amateur subtitling is undertaken by non-professionals and governed by dramatically different constraints than professional subtitling. Often, the source text is digitised from a low-quality recording, and the resulting subtitles are conditioned by how much the subtitle producer has heard and understood from the original dialogue. As amply illustrated in Bogucki’s contribution, this approach is likely to result in a multitude of mistakes and misinterpretations.