My perspective on English dubs

The Dub vs. Sub war seems to usually be among native English speakers, but here's something that I've noticed as a foreigner from Scandinavia:

I think English dubs fail because the voices don't sound the same.

It's not about the performance. It's not about tone or inflection or emotion or intent or character understanding or dubbing changes or anything like that. My point is literally "If this character is voiced by Norio Wakamoto, then an American actor voicing that character should sound like Norio Wakamoto speaking fluent English. And a Spanish actor should sound like Norio Wakamoto speaking Spanish. And a German actor should sound like Norio Wakamoto speaking German. And so on, and so on."

This is common how to dub in our country.

The voice can still remain as it is, especially if it's an iconic one. If Spongebob spoke in a dub of a different language, you would want something that reminded of the original voice and not something entirely new. The way he expresses his annoyance can be different in order to fit the culture's way of acting, but the iconic voice should remain the same.

While there are rare cases of Executive Meddling being successful, like with Dragon Ball dub - it's still rare and almost never represent the majority of such.

This is my perspective on the matter.

edited 10th Jul '15 8:27:04 AM by One_Island

*Cough*

edited 9th Jul '15 12:27:11 PM by Mizerous

Mileena Madness

...You say that like it's a bad thing.

A translation will always be limited by the original source. An adaptation has the capacity to surpass it.

[Edit] ed. I meant

It's written in the title. "My perspective" is basically used interchangeably with "in my opinion."

edited 9th Jul '15 12:33:30 PM by One_Island

Also, there are a lot of stories that are all about spinning new perspectives on established characters.

Like.

For instance, Marvel comics and films and their adaptations of Norse Myth and their versions of Thor and Loki.

...In an anime example, Dragon Ball started off as a parody of Journey to the West.

The thing about art is that it always has the capacity to be transformative.

Yes, I consider it to be a bad thing to give life to a character that already has life sustained by another person. I don't want Spongebob to sound like Robin William's Genie. It's the same thing you are suggesting, you just don't know it because you are limited to one language (I presume).

I would prefer someone making a close impression to the original voice actor.

Your examples are not dub. They are story-wise. Which I of course agree with. I do like the Batmans throughout the ages from the 1960s campy Batman to the dark and gritty Batman. This is about voices and dubs.

edited 9th Jul '15 12:40:20 PM by One_Island

I see your beginning post and raise you this:

Here

edited 9th Jul '15 12:39:02 PM by Aldo930

"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."

...So you're saying that no manga should be adapted into an anime because they've had their life sustained by their writers and panel artists, and giving that character to animators and voice actors is some sort of betrayal?

The distinctions you're making don't quite work.

Well, no, but someone putting their own mark or stamp on a character is reasonable.

In theatre tradition it's even expected. So many actors always want to play Hamlet so that, in some way, they can take the character and make him their own. The character has a lot of traits that are baked in, but people love finding new ways to twist or interpret them or emphasize one.

It's a basic part of storytelling. Frankly, I think it's a better form of storytelling.

Please don't.

And I don't think it's the same at all.

I can respect that preference. I feel like it's a misguided one because the way acting works in Japan is very different from the way it works in the U.S.

Western acting comes from the tradition of Shakespeare's theater, and Japanese acting stems from Kabuki. The two types of performance work in extremely different ways. This video about a Japanese adaptation of a Shakespeare play highlights some of the differences in a nuanced and respectful way.

That's fine. Doesn't mean we can't have a discussion about it.

There's no difference in my mind.

You take something that already exists and change it in some way for the consumption of a different audience.

edited 9th Jul '15 12:56:03 PM by unnoun

I'm planning to watch that. Never heard of it until now. This seems to be a rare case of dub where it's not a dub at all. It would be nice to know how much it deviates from the actual plot.

edited 9th Jul '15 12:47:48 PM by One_Island

I mean, 4 kids edits with invisible guns, and the way some dubbing companies used to remove lines about death, and the very existence of abridged series as a concept would indicate to me all the ways that it's possible to take the basic framework of an anime series and tell a slightly different story with it.

To me it's a perfect example of a transformative work.

Now, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

But the idea that a more faithful translation is inherently better is. Not something I can agree with.

To switch tracks and discuss video games a little bit, in the West the character of Kefka in Final Fantasy is a lot better received than he was in Japan, because the translation of his lines was altered to give him a lot of different jokes that he didn't have originally. In Japan he's considered boring, in the U.S. he's considered one of the most interesting and entertaining villains.

In his dubbed lines in Dissidia, in Japan he had a thing where he'd switch between the masculine forms of Japanese and the feminine forms, but since English doesn't have that sort of thing he had to switch between a higher pitched almost falsetto and some deeper growls.

Most of the time you literally can't just do exactly what was done in the original because there are often a lot of things that just don't carry over.

edited 9th Jul '15 12:57:51 PM by unnoun

Ok for starters, I dont like this "English dubs are (almost) always terrible" attitude you have Topic Creator. I think it has more to do that English is a pretty...obvious language, so bad acting stands out too much. But English dubs CAN be good! It is much harder to tell Japanese bad acting...unless its REALLY hammy like Battle Royale for example

Watch Michiko And Hatchin for some great and natural performances. Even low budget dubs like Pretty Cure have decent and natural performances. And they DO stay close to the original scripts, thank you very much, English scripts can be close to the original and dont assume that's not the case.. Also Im not from a english speaking country so Im not biased.

Discord: Waido X 255#1372 If you cant contact me on TV Tropes do it here.

...I'm not quite sure why being from an English speaking country is a bias.

English is a language. It's not an especially good language, but it is one. Barely.

I'm also not quite sure why "faithful" is necessarily "good" or "better".

It probably isn't if you're a native Japanese-speaker who grew up in a Japanese-culture and experienced a lot of Japanese media.

As a side-note, to mention video games again. Metroid Other M is a game where the Japanese director of the game sat in with the English voice actress for the lead and did the voice direction himself. And basically everybody hates the voice acting, because, to western audiences, and western standards for how acting is "supposed" to work, it sounds lifeless, bored, and even lazy. But the Japanese director thought it was perfect. Exactly like the Japanese voice actor. Who was right? Well, nobody, technically, because Japanese acting styles and Western acting styles are different from one another in terms of their approach and purpose and what they convey and how they convey it.

Except Japanese acting styles didn't really work at all for the English audience the game was being released for though. What would have been right for the voice acting in the game's Japanese release was wrong for the release in the West.

...Nevermind the fact that in Japan there's a lot more cases of voice actors recording lines together, while in the U.S. it's more common for an actor to come in, record their own lines and leave.

edited 9th Jul '15 1:16:27 PM by unnoun

Hey! Im in on Team English dub here! Im on your side!

I thought he might assume Im just defending because Im an English Speaker.

I do agree with you. 255% Accuracy isnt as great as people as think. Japanese Acting and Grammar just dont translate when left intact. But I wanted to show him that English can be faithful and true to the original too.

Discord: Waido X 255#1372 If you cant contact me on TV Tropes do it here.

I wasn't disagreeing with you really.

Sorry.

OH! In that case I have to apologize. I was too pushy.

Discord: Waido X 255#1372 If you cant contact me on TV Tropes do it here.

I was more sort of elaborating.

Straw man argument fallacy. We are talking about voice acting here. Not adaptation.

Why not? No one are talking about retcon here. We are talking about dub. Look up the definitions for both. They are two distinct concepts, whether you accept it or not. It's by definition.

I don't find this to be persuasive and frankly contradictory.

One reason why your arguments doesn't work is because you are taking strictly classics and tries to use them as examples for untranslatable entertainment. This doesn't work. No one are talking about freaking cultural cores here. I am talking about modern entertainment here that isn't far off from a basic mediator.

However I did.

And could you at least elaborate why it's not the same for you?

That's a pompous attitude to have to say an preference/opinion is "misguided." Also, I'm aware of the way of acting is different. That's the case for most cultures. I know that because I like to watch Arabic movies and I can definitely see the difference in acting. It's alright to alter the acting and dialogue, I'm talking about voice itself. It's not like Attack On Titans would have died from having voice actors matching the original counterparts. We aren't talking about Sazae-San sort of anime here (which is strictly Japanese)!

I do understand that and I do have an opinion about that, but this is firstly off-topic. I like to remind you this is not _how_ you translate the entire atmosphere of a series, but the very (and only) the voices of the characters; we are talking about how English voice actors tries to do their own thing for a character with a preordained voice instead of having English V As' voices to match their Japanese counterparts rather than the characters in general.

As for my opinion about the off-topic subject you're coming with, I don't like that. I could understand the jokes and the dramatic scenes **being altered to retain the same effect,** but I also prefer it not to be completely culturally cleansed of the its origins. 4kids' One Piece comes as an example and Funimation's One Piece comes as an example for when executed adequately (and one thing about Funimation's One Piece is that they try to have voice actors matching the original counterparts and it fits perfectly).

I know that. Read the comment I replied to. The person seemed to think I didn't specify this being an opinion, which I did in the very title. However, I never implied that this being an opinion should halt any potential discussion or debate from it.

I see several differences. One being visual adaptation and another being a verbal translation. These are two different roads here.

edited 9th Jul '15 1:20:34 PM by One_Island

Distinct concepts, perhaps, but not completely unrelated ones.

I didn't say they were untranslatable. I said that there's nothing wrong with altering things.

And, frankly, most adaptations of Shakespeare are done within the same culture as other adaptations of Shakespeare. In some instances, they were even done in the same culture that they were written in. While Shakespeare was still alive.

And there've been black Hamlets and female Hamlets and manic depressive Hamlets Obsessive compulsive Hamlets and Arabic Hamlets and Spanish Hamlets and Marxist Hamlets and Fascist Hamlets and misogynistic Hamlets and feminist Hamlets (which I thought was a bit of a stretch) and some of those Hamlets changed the text or translated it and some of them didn't but every single one of them delivered the words completely differently from any of the other Hamlets.

And it's not even always because the alteration to the original was "necessary". A lot of the time it was because they felt it would be more interesting that way. In many cases they were right.

Change is change. Difference is difference. It can be positive or negative or neither.

For starters, making Spongebob have Robin Williams's Genie voice wouldn't be an actor leaving their own mark on the character. It would still be an actor attempting to imitate Robin Williams's performance.

I wish you hadn't. It was a little rude.

And I'm trying to.

...Altering the tone and atmosphere is fine, but altering the voices isn't?

edited 9th Jul '15 1:35:09 PM by unnoun

I don't share such an attitude. Quote me on that. I said why I (and many others) don't think most English dubs are good *in comparison* to the Japanese counterparts, and it usually is because the different spins on established characters, which usually are never good ideas. I do like English dubs and I do find most to be good, I just said that they are terrible in comparison to the original reasons for a variety of reasons that I won't be discussing here since each anime has its own individual reason as to why I consider the English version to be more flawed than the Japanese counterpart. A gist for them all would be, like I said before, English dubs usually tries to put different spins on established characters.

I'm being misunderstood here. I'm not talking about scripts. I'm talking about the voices, straight-out voice performance. The oral, the verbal. Not the textual. The translation here does not matter. This is about the performance. It could be Samurai Pizza Cats for all I care, as long as the voices matches which was my point as to why I think most dislike the English dubs _because_ they almost never match.

Straw man. I never said any native English speaker is biased. I said that they may not be able to have enough expertise if they only share one language to distinguish.

I'm not sure anyone can have enough expertise if they learned every language in the world.

When dealing with media and acting, it's not just language, but an entire culture and an entire mode of storytelling involved.

Fair enough. I agree with that.

Discord: Waido X 255#1372 If you cant contact me on TV Tropes do it here.

You said that like it's a negative.

Putting a different spin on established characters is, to me, something always worth doing.

...And part of the difference between languages is also how they're spoken.

The inflection and the emphasis can't always be put in the same place.

And there are some cadences in speaking that come across differently in different languages.

And there are different acting traditions which lead to different actors taking different roles, like.

...I mean, to bring up Dragon Ball, one woman, Masako Nozawa, ended up voicing Goku's entire male family because of reasons. And that's perfectly fine, it works for Goku in Japan. But getting a male voice actor with a different vocal range works pretty well for Goku in the west.

And finally.

...I mean, basically no actor in any culture really wants to be told to just imitate another actor's performance. Actors are also artists, and making a character their own, and coming to inhabit a character is part of their craft. It's often a big part of why they became actors.

I mean, if all you wanted was to imitate something, you could probably have trained parrots.

I see it completely unrelated with absolutely no connection whatsoever unless you prove me otherwise with a persuasive argument. But I don't see any.

There is nothing wrong with **alteration in order to contextualize it for its audience of a different background,** of course. All dubbing companies do this, notably they change Japanese jokes into making them sense of them in the English language. As long as it doesn't alter it to completely "Americanize" it, like 4Kids did.

But this is off-topic as well.

You're completely missing the point of the analogy. You do realize it was meant to be an analogy? And here we can just assume Robin Williams was the actor himself if that's what you like to imagine in the scenario. It's like explaining a math analogy to a child by using chocolate cake and the child says "I don't like chocolate cake. I prefer strawberry." That's not the point here, if you want to imagine it as strawberry, go ahead. I was simply making it analogous for you to better understand the point here.

It wasn't intended to.

Still not persuasive.

As crazy as it may seem that's the point of my thread, yes. The voice is what ticks most people off due to it not sounding remotely close to the original. However, one doesn't care whether the script matches or not if it has a good voice imitator.

edited 9th Jul '15 1:49:24 PM by One_Island

That's not what I was talking about.

I was talking about alteration for the sake of alteration.

...Of the languages I speak fluently, Japanese isn't one of them.

To me, rather a lot of professional Japanese acting sounds a little annoying, to be honest. Which I recognize as my problem, but at the same time, I don't know that I think I would like the voices much better if it was in English.

There are some performances that don't sound very good to me in Japanese. In particular, there's a tendency for female characters and children to have an extremely high pitch and speak very rapidly that I do not find enjoyable personally. There are enough of those performances for me to chalk it up to cultural differences, and for me to say that it's fine, but I don't think I'd want to hear an English dub where the performance was done in the exact same way.

I mean, what even do you mean by "voice" here? Pitch? Tone? Accent?

...And you accuse me of being pompous?

Yes I realize it was an analogy.

And if Robin Williams had always been the voice of Spongebob, then the main problem would be that he'd already used that voice as the Genie.

If Robin Williams suddenly became the voice of Spongebob then. It'd be different from what the listener had always heard, but I don't see how it'd necessarily be bad.

edited 9th Jul '15 1:55:58 PM by unnoun

Bringing up Masako is actually a good point, because Masako's Goku is generally loathed in the States. It's too screechy, it's too shrill, it sounds like a 10-year-old getting kicked in the nuts. Masako keeping the voice from Goku's kid days by Toriyama's request works for Japan, but when it got dubbed they got a near-30 man to voice the near-30 man.