Forum - View topicNEWS: Night Raid 1931's English Cast Announced
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leftbehindxp
 Posts: 142 |
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If you guys want to check the dub out there's a free download on iTunes for the first episode here. Enjoy
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prime_pm
 Posts: 2341 Location: Your Mother's Bedroom |
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A little nepotism here, Chris?
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Echo_City
Posts: 1236 |
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Thanks for the link to that tweet.
I'm not sure I'd want to hear an English dub where the actors slated are supposed to speak Chinese. I imagine it would go down the same path as Japanese voice actors "speaking" English--at best it is intelligible, but certainly not a fluent native speaker. I'm sure it could be done, getting these actors to pull of decent Chinese, as Joss Wheadon's Firefly demonstrates. Though as Firefly also showed, it was a detested & uphill battle for the actors to do this, and is it really worth the effort, and expense, for underdog ADV? Especially since this would have to be 1930s Chinese. Undoubtedly there would be fan outcry from punctilious fans were the dub to employ modern Chinese. I'd wager that those fans are the ones who would never watch an English dub, but their complaints can still have weight. 
Even the History Channel overdubs Japanese/Chinese/German/etc with a translator speaking English. If ADV could pull off a brilliant inclusion of Chinese, more power to them. However, given the risk and my predilection to English, I'd be perfectly accepting were they to take the "Japanese route" and simply put all spoken dialogue in English, acknowledging that it technically was not spoken in that tongue, for the convenience of the viewer. An example of which being The Black Lagoon Company. ADV is actually already predisposed towards that sort of all-English dubbing, as seen in Le Chevalier D'Eon. Foster acknowledges how much of a PITA it would have been to have everyone speak in a French accent, or actual period French, and how it would have ultimately sounded like crap. Same goes for German & Russian in that show. John Grimillion played the Count of Cagliostro in D'Eon, and spoke only in English, and it was good. Why change a good thing, especially when it costs money that not even Funimation is likely to have? |
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ArsenicSteel
 Posts: 2370 |
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Except Black Lagoon is not Night Raid. The "Japanese route" for this anime was to include multiple spoken languages. As for 1930's Mandarin. Why not just take the Mandarin that was spoken in the anime and repeat it. That way puritans are satisfied and ADV gets to pull the "retaining the artist's integrity" card to any criticisms about the Russian and Mandarin lines. Going with one spoken language works fine for shows that were written and drawn that way. Changing a mixed language piece to a single language piece in the dubbing process is just begging for visual and story inconsistencies. |
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The King of Harts
 Posts: 6712 Location: Mount Crawford, Virginia |
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Too bad Matt Greenfield didn't apply this logic to Tears to Tiara. I personally like it when dubs cover other languages and hate it when they don't *coughStrawberryMarshmallowcough*, but accents can be iffy. However, doing an entire dub with Irish accents was undeniably a bad idea, especially when your lead actor already has a fairly thick Honduran accent. I'm not getting Night Raid, so whether they cover the Chinese or not doesn't matter to me, but if I were, I'd wish for it to be covered. It's not like I'd know how good or bad it is, but it's characteristic of the show that can be applied in English. |
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Echo_City
Posts: 1236 |
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So are you suggesting that the original Japanese dub audio of these other languages be employed, or that the ADV actors should just mimic what was said? In the case of the former, assuming it would be permitted, would it not be jarring to hear a character's voice radically change depending on what language he speaks? If, say, John Grimillion were to suddenly ascend an octave when he spoke Chinese, I would most certainly find that detracting from the dub. The thin excuse that Chinese is a "tonal language" only goes so far. I'd call that a cop-out, if this option were employed, I'd rather they just not dub it. Some lapses in dubbing,examples being the GirlDeMo songs in Angel Beats! or the church choir song in Coyote Ragtime Show, are fine and well by me. If whole lines of spoken dialogue are left to the Japanese track, I will feel cheated. The only plus would be that I would then have a question to pose to Chris Ayres at those ubiquitous panels at cons. The latter could work, it's worked for countless bands over the years & Firefly showed it could be done, but time and time again the Japanese have tried to employ "fluent" speakers of English, or had actors "sound out" English dialogue, and it has often come to stunning failure. The Second Barrage of The Black Lagoon Company stands in testament to this. Of course, I put more stock in the ADV crew than in the unknown (to me) Japanese actors. I still don't think it is worth the time and expense. Was Le Chevalier D'Eon truly worsened by all the characters speaking English? Was Tears to Tiara truly better for them trying to give the characters accented speech? Harkening back to the second choice above, if the ADV crew had difficulty maintaining "Irish accents", how could they convincingly pull off Chinese? Personally, I want the dub to make the show watchable, good even. ANN has excoriated it, and while I have yet to see it myself, from the summaries I've read, I'm inclined to agree with the critics. To be blunt, what good would language "authenticity" do if the show were to suck? Is there anywhere else the first dubbed episode is available for viewing besides iTunes? If so, where might that be? |
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configspace
Posts: 3717 |
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Except that in Night Raid, having Japanese accents when Japanese characters speak other languages is perfectly natural as it fits into the story. The other secondary characters and extras who don't speak any Japanese at all are voiced by native speakers.
It was no better or worse. They should've been speaking French so it makes no difference.
Tears to Tiara dub was just terribad, but hilariously so. The original Night Raid has the advantage that the characters themselves are Japanese communicating with non-Japanese so the non-fluent accents are a realistic expectation like I mentioned. |
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ArsenicSteel
Posts: 2370 |
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If it is the case of using the Japanese dub for the Mandarin then how much different it sounds from the ADV actors depends on how well they can mimic the voices of the original actors. If they sound a lot a like the original cast then there won't a radical change when the Mandarin pops up. But I was referring to the ADV actors doing all of the lines even the language specific ones.
It's not a thin excuse, it's a linguistic fact.
Well the only reason you would put more stock in the ADV crew doing it is because they would be speaking in a foreign language and you would not be hypercritical of pronunciation issues. The English dub when they put on a Japanese accent just to say their character's Japanese names don't sound any better. English dubs would rather ruin the atmosphere that's created by multilingual audio tracks over sounding uncool by mispronouncing some foreign words a bit. I don't know why you put more stock in English dubbers when they have proven an aversion to speaking anything other than English in dubs. I have heard more Original Audio like Rainbow, Detective Conan, and Hajime No Ippo do fine jobs when certain characters don't speak in Japanese.
The dub can suck with or without retaining the other languages. Attempting to retain the intention of the original work means dialogue, visuals, and the plot won't need to be massaged in order to hide the inconsistency a single language dub would produce. |
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