Forum - View topicAnswerman - Do Dubs Really Contain More Swearing?
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MarshalBanana
 Posts: 5357 |
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Outside of Panty and Stocking, Black Lagoon and any dub by Manga(which I'm happy you brought up), I can't think of many shows with much swearing. But then again it's not something you pay much attention to as you get older, when I first saw Outlaw Star I paid attention to over single sear word.
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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Ah, those simple days of yore in which not even Urusei Yatsura was immune from a liberal peppering of rather savoury wordage. Still, it gave the first wave of our otherwise clueless fandom something at which to marvel once they'd already seen Akira. |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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Well, it was off Cartoon Network because CN doesn't want comedies that aren't "edgy" or trippy, so Funi had to work overtime to convince CN that their "All-out pop-ref comic assault" was another insane censor-tweaking Shin-chan....And then got angry and took it out on the show when it wasn't and they didn't. Pioneer's dub of Lupin III V2, similarly, had to convince CN it was actually a "raunchy sex comedy" just to get it past the Williams Street Potheads--Which explains why the normally staunch-conservative Zenigata would suddenly go into Tourettes-like fits of "Crapcrapcrap friggin' crap!" Basically, small-studio dubbing in the early days didn't know whether it was appealing to all audiences, or just to us college-age underground folk-- Some fans complained that the early dub of "Elf Princess Rane" got a little too gratuitous on the PG-cursing when the dub studio was trying to make an otherwise untranslatable comedy dub "crazier". |
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bemused Bohemian
Posts: 404 Location: central Mizzou (Moral Oralville) |
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I've watched both versions (English dub & sub) Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt. From what I recall the female voice actors at Funi must have had a great time voicing creative colorful descriptors re female parts in the ensuing episodic applications sprinkled throughout the show. Imagination-wise I found the dub version far more colorful (and educational) to my ear than the sub as translated via my sight to my brainwaves.
I can show the sub-version of Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt to some of my friends who really aren't into anime but are tolerant toward this genre. I can't say the same about their reactions when I run this show using the English dub. Their loss...........lol? |
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SpacemanHardy
Posts: 2509 |
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Gantz had a whole bunch of them too. |
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Satoshi Batista
Posts: 13 |
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[quote="Stuart Smith"]
I just said that was a word choice flub on my part.
I'm trying to imagine what a crass and curse-ladden version of Urusei Yatsura would even sound like. Actually I think fairly recently there was an article on the site mentioning the English dub of Super Gals, which was only like 13 years ago, and saying how jarring it is to hear them use the word "retard" so frequently. |
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Punch Drunk Marc
Posts: 1744 |
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IIRC, Jamie Marchi (The voice of Panty and the show's scrpit writer) said she was told by the Japanese staff when she was writing the show to make it as raunchy as possible. Based off interviews everyone involved with the show sounds like they loved working on it. Probably because of all that creative freedom they had to just do whatever. |
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JDude042
 Posts: 261 |
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Ah yes... the whole topic of how the person translating something from Japanese may tend to put their own spin on it... depending on the context of course.
I remember watching a fansub of Bleach almost ten years ago, around the part where Ichigo and Byakuya's fight in Soul Society was coming to a conclusion and Byakuya shows off some high level technique of his bankai and this is what we got... Ichigo: Sugae na! (A pretty proper translation of that would be, "That's incredible!" What did the subtitle translation say you may ask...? "That's tight!" I remember thinking stuff along the lines of "What the hell..." and "Since when did Ichigo start speaking in ebonics? I'm pretty sure that's not what he's actually saying..." Nowadays I know a little better, although I still think it was a pretty dumb translation. I do kind of cringe a bit when I see excessive use of the F word in some translations, mainly fan translations obviously, and especially for characters who I can't imagine screaming the F word. In those cases, I think a more literal or toned down translation certainly wouldn't hurt. |
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wonderwomanhero
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Hell Girl episode 7 had a large amount of swearing added for no reason. So, you basically hear Caitlin Glass saying the f-word every other second.
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John Thacker
Posts: 1006 |
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I thought that this only applied to South Korea (kankoku) because the official North Korean name for North Korea is (in Kanji) 朝鮮民主主義人民共和国 which starts with 朝鮮 or chousen. In Hangul 조선민주주의인민공화국 where the 조선 is Choson/Joseon/Chosun, after an dynasty that ended in 1897. North Korea is popularly shortened to 北朝鮮 (kita chousen, or North Korea). South Korea (大韓民国, dai kan minkoku (great Korean popularly shortened 韓国, kankoku) takes its name from the Republic/Empire of Korea, 1897-1910. It's true that after the Japanese conquered Korea in 1910 it forcibly reverted the peninsula to the Choson name, so for that reason it's very impolite to use it around South Koreans or for South Korea... but it's not clear what to do with North Korea since that's the official North Korean name. |
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Ryusui
 Posts: 461 |
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It's all contextual. A kid tripping and scraping his knee might shout "kuso!", as might a battle-hardened warrior whose hometown has just been razed in front of him. Unless you're deliberately aiming for some very peculiar clashes in tone, rendering the former as "GODDAMMIT!" would make about as much sense as rendering the latter as "Darn!"
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John Thacker
Posts: 1006 |
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Except that the monophthongization of [ai ae ie oi] to [eː] is a feature of the Shitamachi dialect of Tokyo (working class old Edoite "downtown" dialect, perhaps comparable to outer borough NYC accents). "That's incredible!" is almost certainly inaccurate and improper as a translation because it's too proper and not colloquial enough. |
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Kruszer
 Posts: 7985 Location: Minnesota, USA |
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I don't mind swearing personally, and in a lot of cases I think it serves to give the dub some needed spice. I tend to find a lot of Japanese dialog to be not that well written, so if there is something added to the English script that fits the flaps and emphasizes or clarifies something without losing anything important, than I don't mind it. Especially when half of the dialog seems to consist of characters saying or yelling names of other characters. There hasn't been that many times where I've been watching an anime and thought "Huh, that curse word wasn't really necessary".
My policy on swearing in anime is based on a couple things. The the tone of the situation in the show for one. If it is an anime with extreme situations than harsh language would make sense because it's natural for people to react like that. Second, if the characters doing the swearing are the kind you would generally associate with a colorful vocabulary like criminals, delinquents, soldiers, mercenaries, etc it would get a pass. I would also not find it strange if people who had generally abusive, angry, or just plain psychopathic personalities swore. |
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JDude042
Posts: 261 |
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Yep, you caught me red-handed. My knowledge of the language definitely pales in comparison to yours, but more so I was just trying to drive the point home of the "somewhat strange" subtitle translation. Thanks for the lesson either way. |
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John Thacker
Posts: 1006 |
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Yeah, the problem is that there's no perfect translation, it certainly depends at least on the intended audience. Something natural to one audience is strange to another; dated slang usage is one notable problem, and there are pretty big cultural differences just around different cultures in the US about how frequently people swear, etc. This also sometimes leads to a situation where non-native English speakers learn English through TV and movies and then swear too much when visiting an English-speaking country, in formal situations and the like. (I knew a grad student teaching assistant from Spain that had that problem.) Then you get into the questions of whether you're translating for someone who can be expected to be familiar with some Japanese terms ("sensei" and "ninja" are almost certainly ok, but I've certainly seen shinobi -> "ninja" and tsunami -> "tidal wave," which seem excessive. On the other hand, Capcom's new translators for the Phoenix Wright series, which used to adapt things an enormous amount, decided that they didn't have to translate shishou in the latest game. Do people want to hear cool streams of Kanji for attacks, or have them translated? What about honorifics and endings? People referred to by their last name when the first name would be used in English? How do you balance "this sounds weird in English" versus losing precision of different forms of address? If you're translating for a US audience, is it worth leaving something as "Hamburg steak," (which is less known in the US) or is the close more common in the US "Salisbury steak" ok? (Note that Japanese-style Hamburg steak is not quite the same thing as what is served by that name in Europe, being adapted for the Japanese palate?) What about false friends and words that have changed significantly in meaning since being adapted from English into Japanese; should "juice" be translated as such, or with a more generic drink term? Conversely, "spaghetti with meat sauce" will sound fine to American ears, while non North American English speakers may wonder why "Spaghetti Bolognese" wasn't used. |
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