Anime?

[Zapper]

I don't get why so many American dubs are... not the best. It often sounds like someone is reading a script and the translations are often made-up (Funimation loves to do that...)
Usually American cartoon dubs are really good, the voices are lively and well acted. And then in mainstream anime all of a sudden the talent is gone. Why?
American dubs of Ghibli movies, for example, are top notch.

I usually prefer watching in my native language and while there are people who love to scream "subs or bust!" I actually find that German anime dubs are well done for the most part, using actual actors we would also hear being standard voices for Hollywood dubs and so on.
Of course there has been a decline in the last couple of years, as studios will sometimes hire "celeb" voices even though they can't voice act. But it's still leagues better than what I hear in English. Again, Funimation comes to mind. Their only dub I find better than the original is Hetalia. I will take beatings for this opinion

[Taffeta]

TBH, the sub/dub argument is a bit redundant because subs can have serious problems too. Some series are worse than others, and some sources too, and probably it differs over different languages, but as much as I don't like dubs...I often wish my TV would let me turn CR's subs off because they're distracting when they're wrong.

It may be because they are having to match the mouth movements of the characters, who are not animated in that language. But I don't know if that also is a problem for English language materials translated into other tongues - Zapper, you will know that better than me.

A lot of things also don't translate well. Japanese and English are really different. It can be very hard to convey the same intent in English as in the original, especially with plays on words or hierarchy.

I don't like the Ghibli dubs either. But I think that's also on me and my ears. I was never bothered about dubs before I studied Japanese. Now I notice the accent and the pronunciation in dubs which I never did before., And that makes them unlistenable for me.

That and Fushigi Yuugi, which sounds at times like a couple of guys having a laugh in their front room doing impressions. For all it is sometimes cheesy (90s anime) and a bit brutal, the English dub is still the most horrible dub I ever heard and the one that switched me forever.

[Zapper]

It may be because they are having to match the mouth movements of the characters, who are not animated in that language. But I don't know if that also is a problem for English language materials translated into other tongues - Zapper, you will know that better than me.

It is, but our voice actors are specifically trained to speak to match the lip movements. It's a much bigger industry here, usually done by trained actors. Sometimes the translation will take some liberties to match the lip movements better. Crude example, but a famous one: "b*tch". German dub famously translates this as "Miststück" because it fits the mouth movement while in mainstream German people would use a much nastier word.

In anime the lip movements don't matter as much because it's less noticable when a drawn mouth just flaps open and shut. But there will be odd pauses sometimes. In that case we just pretend the character had to think about their next words

There are a couple older kids anime that had looooots of fun with the dub. Using slang, jokey insults and all sorts of nonsense. I can't really give examples but it happened a lot in 90s and early 00s shonen and shoujo anime.
But in my opinion our dubs never tried to erase Japanese culture the way American dubs used to do. Like, we never called a rice cake a donut And German dubs would also more often use the Japanese honorary suffixes like senpai, sama, etc. Only the names were often americanized.

I was a tad confused as a kid when in Sailor Moon someone would call the girls "chan"

[Ponyfan]

Another one bites the dust...

(But if you want to compare Haru to Furuya you kind of have to...xD)

I'm looking forward to hearing Furuya's va in Free. 

When I hear Zeno in Nori, there is always a moment of "Wait, a minute Zeno shouldn't be on a baseball diamond."


The Viz dub of Sailor Moon is very accurate compared to the original Japanese. There is one scene that they changed because in Japanese it was a play on words and wouldn't have made sense in English if it had been translated directly.   

For me the worst Ghibli dub I've seen so far is Howl's Moving Castle.  The va for young Sophie is really flat and sounds like she is either bored or just reading the script whenever her character speaks. 



Ponyfan

[Taffeta]

Does Viz actually call SM Usagi? If so that's a huge step up.

@Zapper - that's interesting! The Japanese voice artist industry is on a legend level in terms of all the different things they're expected to do, but I don't really know about the English versions. My favourite stupid translation was sake as 'tea' in the Toonami very abridged version of Tenchi Muyou!, the first anime I ever properly watched. Ryouko drinking 'tea!' in class and getting clearly drunk was always amusing since it was so obviously alcohol. And then they airbrushed the onsen scenes. My mother was teaching some Japanese people English at this point and they thought that was nuts.

I remember there's a whole outtake section on one anime DVD I own with the English language VAs making jokes out of what's actually happening and making up their own dialogue.  So that happens as well.

But I think it matters for me that most dubs in English are American. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's just not my native English in accent or vocabulary, so I tend to notice more, especially with certain words that are pronounced differently (like lever) or where vocab is different (like sidewalk, etc).

[Zapper]

But I think it matters for me that most dubs in English are American. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's just not my native English in accent or vocabulary, so I tend to notice more, especially with certain words that are pronounced differently (like lever) or where vocab is different (like sidewalk, etc).

I oddly have issues with that as well. Not so much about the words but the accent. I know American English well enough to notice reagional accents and it's really odd when a character is - for example - talking in a Valley slang and the other one is using Midwestern. That simply wouldn't fly in German where dialects would sound super out of place as they are so closely tied to regions. Seeing a Japanese character talk like a Bavarian would freak people out

PS; maybe that's why I like the Hetalia dub over the sub. In the dub they all have mock accents based on the countries they represent. In Japanese they are using regional Japanese accents and dialects.

[Taffeta]

Actually, kansai-ben does get a regular outing in anime in the Japanese versions, even when the story is set in Tokyo. One example immediately springing to mind is Maezono in Daiya, who is from Osaka, even though the school is in Tokyo and the team play in the Tokyo tournament. So I think the dubs usually try to convey when a dialect is being slipped into the actual story. Fushigi Yuugi doesn't bother, mind you. Tasuki is also kansai (because the writer of Yuugi was from that area) but the dub is not distinctive in trying to show that. Yuugi used Kansaiben to indicate the mountain bandits - they all speak Kansaiben in the original.

In Bleach you have both Kansai and Kyoto-ben, and also Hiroshima, which gets associated with yakuza.  And there's a fair amount of northern dialect peppering dialogue in Haikyuu...since that's set up in the north near Sendai. I'm pretty sure that's also true of the dialect in Erased, which is somewhat set in Hokkaidou.

And at the other extreme, Hakata Tonkatsu Ramens has a lot of Fukuokaben because it's set around this part of Kyuushuu. With some of these it relates to where the story is set, but in others there's some licence with the language if the writer wants a certain effect. I assume the dubs try to do the same.

I can understand Kansai and Kyotoben quite well - it's actually quite melodic in some cases, it sounds softer and very different to Kantou (Tokyo) Japanese (depending on the character), so it's probably noticeable. Kyotoben is more refined than Kansai, but they are quite similar. When I was in Kyoto, one of my contacts there had great pleasure teaching me dialect habits xD but I could understand him fine when he was speaking proper local dialect and he was quite impressed. (Yay for the lessons of anime xD).

[Carrehz]

I don't care for what I've heard of a lot of modern dubs, too. for me, it's that a lot of the voices are very... samey? 80s/90s dubs definitely had problems, and the voices were usually one of them... but on the other hand, at least they were distinct from each other (for better or worse!).

not a fan of the Ghibli dubs I've heard either, but to be fair, I'm a subber. like Taffeta, I've been turned off by bad older dubs Although I DO like the dub of The Cat Returns, they did a great job with that one. I think it helps that there's nothing in that that'd be really difficult to translate, or doesn't work in English, etc (except for one pun involving similarly-sounding words, but they figured out a decent way of translating the pun IMO). Although I still don't get why Disney changed Natoru into a guy for the dub :s

I believe Viz used the original names for everyone in Sailor Moon (have they got up to Stars? I'd be interested to see what they did for Tin Nyanko's name, if they'd keep that as-is or translated it to Tin Kitty or something).

[Ponyfan]

Does Viz actually call SM Usagi? If so that's a huge step up.

Viz kept all of the Japanese names for the characters

Ponyfan

[Taffeta]

Does Viz actually call SM Usagi? If so that's a huge step up.

Viz kept all of the Japanese names for the characters

Ponyfan

Awesome. I really hate when series try to rename characters for a Western audience.

Oh! This reminds me of another grievance I have with a dub and cultural translation. Bleach! There's a character called Ishida Uryuu (Ishida is his family name) and in the original he complains a lot when people take liberties and call him Uryuu. So the English dub just start calling him Uryuu like it's nothing because that's how the West works and I'm like...nope.

There was also the making of Yasuaki into a 'sorcerer' instead of an onmyouji, which is a yin-yang practitioner and NOT a sorcerer, in Haruka, but that was sub as it was thankfully never dubbed. I say thankfully because they also rewrote the names Ikutidaru and Sefuru as Icktidarl and Sefle, which would have just grated horribly. Haruka was not a popular enough series to get dubbed when it had the US DVD release, but I don't think it would work in English anyway. It's hard enough with subs since it's set in Heian Japan and the hierarchy between characters is palpable.

[Zapper]

Does Viz actually call SM Usagi? If so that's a huge step up.

Viz kept all of the Japanese names for the characters

I actually love how in the German dub from the 90s Usagi was renamed to Bunny. Kids know what a bunny is even though it's English. But it works as a name and that's how us kids could make the connection between her bunny items and the moon rabbit story. It's a good example for why sometimes dubs need to change names to make concepts work for children who can't be expected to know all about foreign cultures.

Another example would be the creature Falcor from The Neverending Story. His original name is Fuchur but English speakers, especially kids, would pronounce that falsely to make it sound like a dirty word. Hence the name change.

[Taffeta]

Does Viz actually call SM Usagi? If so that's a huge step up.

Viz kept all of the Japanese names for the characters

I actually love how in the German dub from the 90s Usagi was renamed to Bunny. Kids know what a bunny is even though it's English. But it works as a name and that's how us kids could make the connection between her bunny items and the moon rabbit story. It's a good example for why sometimes dubs need to change names to make concepts work for children who can't be expected to know all about foreign cultures.

Another example would be the creature Falcor from The Neverending Story. His original name is Fuchur but English speakers, especially kids, would pronounce that falsely to make it sound like a dirty word. Hence the name change.

There's a difference, though, between Bunny, given the meaning, and Serena, which is just insipid and has zero relevance to the story whatsoever.

[Carrehz]

I actually don't mind Serena too much - they should've kept it as Usagi, or Bunny, but it does feel like they put a bit of thought into it. Serena = Princess Serenity = Mare Serenitatis so it's still sorta moon themed? I disagree with the change, but I think it's better than say, Mew Ichigo from Tokyo Mew Mew (fitting in with TMM's food naming theme, her attacks being strawberry-themed, etc) becoming Mew Zoey.

with name changes, for me, it depends on the context. like with Pokemon, I'm fine with the name changes, cause most of them still get the intended meaning across. I.e. Mahowhip (maho=magic, whip=whipped cream) vs Alcremie (alchemy + cream), they both get across the idea of magic + whipped cream. (Plus admittedly some of the gen 1 original Pokemon names were ahh, not the most inspired. Moltres' original name is literally "Fire", which yeah, sounds pretty lame to an English ear)
when there's a *reason* to change the name - if it's relatively important for you to understand what the name *means* (and there's no way to work in an explanation elsewhere), or whatever - I understand it.

like - take Ojamajo Doremi for example - one of the girls is named "Hana" because she was born from a flower. The French dub changed her name to "Flora". That makes sense and I agree with it. On the flip side, you've got the US dub renaming Doremi (whose name was kept the same in EVERY other dub, btw) to "Dorie" - why???

[Taffeta]

Don't get me started on soul slayers (zanpakutou, literally soul cutter blades) and even worse, soul reaper (shinigami - death god) in Bleach.

Mind you, worse was when people who had never seen Bleach written in its native language had a hissy fit about the manji symbol...demonstrating that some of this dumbing down is really to try and avoid such things...

But I don't really know why you would specifically watch anime and not be bothered when the whole plot was changed to fit a different cultural paradigm from the original. I remember one guy on a list once asking why there weren't more American themes in anime...and why more anime wasn't set in the US.

"Why do they always set it in Japan? Wouldn't it be more awesome set in the States?"

...Sigh.

[Carrehz]

yeah exactly - if you're watching a show from a different country then of *course* it's gonna have different cultures, etc.

I could understand changing a manji for a TV airing and such - yeah, there's nothing wrong with it, but we all know what the average idiot is gonna think when they see it. Should be kept intact for a DVD release, though.