Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Do Credits Only Sometimes Get Translated?
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11331 |
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Since credits are the topic here, I have to bring up Kingdom for the umpteenth time (sorry). I've never seen any other release done like this. There are no English dub credits. No cast, no ADR director, no scriptwriter, just the translation and DVD authoring credits.
But what they do have is ALL the credits for the Japanese production translated. An entire screen packed with dozens of names of the key animators, another screen for the 3DCG animators, every cast member down to Foot Soldier, everybody. Normally you're lucky to get the main cast and staff on the Japanese side, especially with Funimation dubs. I've always wondered why they bothered, but this article suggests two things to me: it wasn't nearly as much effort as I had imagined them going to, if the licensor provides the credits already (it would still be a nightmare to type them all in during encoding, I think?), and since it wasn't as labor intensive as I had assumed, it was probably done to distract from the mysterious lack of credits for the English dub. Really, it's like Funimation did everything they could to avoid outing anyone involved with the dub (and the sub is the default, as if they hoped no one would notice it even has a dub). Fwiw, Justin Cook was credited as producer in microscopic font on the DVD case, but his Encyclopedia credit has since been deleted. That raises a whole new set of questions! |
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reanimator
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If I'm not mistaken, usually fans who care about Japanese credits are die hard fans who are into Japanese Seiyuu, Music groups, and/or Sakuga fans. Those fans are obsessed with works done in particular anime that caught their attention by confirming which actor, director, or artist are credited in that show and its individual episodes. So having barebones credit only consists of main director(s) and localization actors frustrates those fans as they can't verify their hypothesis on their favorite artists' work/performance right away without slogging through internet translation which is pretty much hit or miss.
Most anime viewers don't care much about credits in general, but those fans who care about credits tend have strong subconscious desire to make connection with artists. Those types would stand in line for hours to get autographs or getting obsessed with their favorite artists' work on online forums and social media. |
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NJ_
Posts: 3005 Location: Wallington, NJ |
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They were doing this long before that (see also the Dragon Ball/Z movies which were inconsistent in how they would screw them up) but it was in 2010 when they were getting called out for it, specifically when it happened with Mermaid, Birdy and also Trigun (which in that case they repeated Geneon's original mistake with it's opening). They also did similar things with Initial D's endings which included blocking half of the music video portions for Fourth Stage. |
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Spoofer
Posts: 356 Location: NY |
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EDIT: Ninja'd while I used 500x more words to say basically the same thing, lol.
I'm surprised that so few people seem to be aware of the large number of dedicated fans who prefer untouched credits. Go to FandomPost or even Blu-ray.com and you'll find a ton. I've never not bought a release because of integrated English credits, but I sure don't like em much, either. Even before I started learning Japanese. Yes, I understand the reason they're done, obviously, as well as respect the reasons of those that appreciate them. But they're sure not for me. I'm an original language fan. I personally don't care one bit who the dub actors are. Certainly not front and center at the beginning of the credits, while the original Japanese staff and actors have the honor of following in their wake. (I don't know if it's still done or not, but I certainly remember the days when dub directors used to refer to themselves as "the director" of such and such show.) I fully respect the localizers and dub actors for their work, but especially with Funi, it's always irked me how much more importance they seem to place on themselves in their credits, extras, and PR. And personally, kanji and whatnot always looked far more aesthetically pleasing to me, and as others have mentioned, Japanese credits typically obstruct far less of the background image. There are innumerable ways that integrated English credits can and have impacted the video over the years, as Zalis previously said. Just a handful of examples that immediately spring to mind: For shows where there are variations in the opening or closing credits, like Trigun or VanDread, the localization companies only bothered to provide a single version, because doing them all was too much work (or they weren't even aware of the changes). Or, sometimes companies just freeze-frame footage to make their credits work. Then you have the instances where there's artistic flair atop film credits, I think 5 Centimeters Per Second is one example. Little bits of tiny artwork accompanying the scrolling credits, entirely absent on the versions of that film that only offered translated credits. The windowboxed credit approach was used by Funi for like half a year, IIRC, making the viewer squint to see the image while the English credits instead took up the majority of the picture. For certain shows, like IIRC Initial D 2nd Stage, the actual finale of the show ran long and was accompanied by kanji credits, and Funi windowboxed that entire finale. Which, was actually better than what TokyoPop originally did with the 2nd Stage finale, where they couldn't handle having kanji shown at all, so they literally entirely replaced the actual finale of the show with reused scenes that approximated the ones they were replacing. They even went back to S1, which was cel-animated (while S2 had gone digital), for some of those replacements. It was. Ab. Surd. In 20 years of being a physical anime fan, I've sure seen it all. Yes, it's less common now than it used to be, but I imagine it still happens from time to time for those that insist on going that route. What's the best way to avoid all this nonsense? Simply provide the original endings with kanji intact, and include a black credit scroll afterwards. Those who care about the show, the art, all the little details, etc., and want to be sure they aren't missing anything from the presentation, get what they want. Those who want to read the translated credits, get what they want. There's no downside, unless someone's just such a hardcore dub fan that they can't stand seeing the original credits play out as they watch the ED. Or, as Justin stated, it might affect broadcast. But then it makes more sense to simply include the integrated credits for broadcast while leaving the original intact on home media. Though ironically I've often found the opposite to be true, where quite often we see original Japanese credits on CR or YT, and then on Home Media we're gifted with integrated. Anyway, so that's my opinion. I have absolutely no love for them, but certainly our fandom has learned to just roll our eyes and deal with it a longass time ago. I'm certainly happy I see more and more companies go the original / black scroll approach, though. Last edited by Spoofer on Tue Jun 12, 2018 7:28 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Kadmos1
Posts: 13549 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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The SE Asian Eng. dubs (you know, Animax) of a lot of anime does this as well. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11331 |
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^ Ok, but do they have pages of translated Japanese production credits? Do the disks default to the Japanese track?
I guess I should've specified Region 1 dvds? I don't buy Region 3 since I can't view them. |
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omoikane
Posts: 494 |
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I like how you describe ...this. Which is to say, you need the original credits in a way to get the names right, because just like how it is a fool's errand to translate 100s of names from Kanji/Chinese into romanji without the original individuals telling you what it is, it's even harder to reverse engineer those names into their original script. So ideally you want both original names and localized names. But since it's a localized product anyway, for an audience who can't read Japanese, it doesn't really matter to me. Plus in this day and age, most of the important things are documented on the internet already. As long as people on the internet realize not every name spelled the same in romanji refers to the same person because their names may be written differently in Japanese, then we're good. Wonder why Indonesian and Vietnamese are left off, I guess their credits tend to be in English anyway. |
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Greed1914
Posts: 4420 |
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Kingdom is a bit of an oddity all around. My impression is that it was something Funimation was forced to dub, and given how quietly they pushed it out the door, forced to take as part of a licensing package. The lack of credits probably was done so it wouldn't be as obvious that they did as little as possible and outsourced it. At least my take is that it ended up being a bad deal for Funimation, and they wanted to fulfill a contract as cheaply as possible without ruffling feathers with the licensors. |
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4074 |
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This says so much about people, it's scary but it also reminds me of an old adage where the Japanese liked being considered inscrutable. Dumb Americans, enigmatic Japanese, two stereotypes at once. Oh wait, that's Hetalia… For my part, I like seeing American companies do something with the clean credits they're given but I also liked those DVDs that used the angle button to show both. But the black, silent credits? I don't think anyone like those. Honestly, wouldn't running that same text over the clean ED with music be preferable to just the black second credits? It shouldn't be that hard to go one step further. The worse ones, the absolute worse ones are the releases that run English credits randomly "at the end". Is the last episode now, what episodes are which again? If you going to be that lazy about credits, why not just make it a separate yet findable feature for the whole work? |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2541 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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I wonder if the whole "the Japanese provide the credits translations" bit explains why anything ADV/Sentai released that involved Yasuhiro Imagawa always used the awkward "Imakawa Yasuhiro" style, which always felt weird & may have kept people from realizing that he actually worked on them.
Honestly, considering that FUNi barely has its name & logo on the packaging at all (the only spot is a small logo on the back covers, & they're not even on the DVDs themselves), I'm more of the mind that FUNi was only used as a distributor for both seasons. Since Kingdom was dubbed in Canada, likely Blue Water, FUNi probably didn't even have any involvement with the dub's production, which is likely why it's not credited anywhere on the release (i.e. the Japanese didn't bother to give FUNi credits for it), and this was likely the Japanese companies that made Kingdom simply hiring FUNi to produce the DVD releases & release them as a distributor. I'm sure FUNi only did what they were paid for, and spared no other expenses, unless necessary. |
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Polycell
Posts: 4623 |
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peno
Posts: 349 |
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Huh? What are you talking about? Not even 4Kids was this stupid. 4Kids credited their cast and staff first and then the Japanese staff and usually it was about 50/50 give or take. Nowadays, TPCI credits Japanese staff (including the voice of Pikachu Ikue Ohtani ) first and then their own staff and cast and the dub credits are only about 1/3 of the whole dub ending credits. |
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Shiroi Hane
Encyclopedia Editor
Posts: 7580 Location: Wales |
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The UK DVDs for Brave Story were like this.
Well, if he was there, it was deleted by the original submitter. If I did it, there would be a trace - and there isn’t.
Sentai were doing this as recently as stuff like From the New World, with a fixed list of half a dozen of the Japanese cast for every episode - not all of whom were even in every episode. |
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K.o.R
Posts: 221 |
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It seems to vary so much. Railgun's (and probably Index's too) end credits are basically just the Funimation staff, with a few cursory Japanese credits at the end. Bad Funimation, slap on wrist!
Whereas in the ADV days, many credit rolls would be ridiculously comprehensive (and is a style I try to emulate if people will let me ). But then you have Rune Soldier, with about six Japanese staff members listed. I'm firmly of the opinion that if you're going to do it, do it properly. Untranslated credits followed by a black screen roll is lazy. |
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Zalis116
Moderator
Posts: 6867 Location: Kazune City |
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I guess I never saw Funi (or TokyoPop's) shenanigans with the Dragonball and Initial D franchises, as I never got into those titles, and didn't really see any Funimation releases until they started being more "hardcore-fan-friendly" with Fruits Basket in 2004.
With Vandread, Geneon did use the correct OPs... I'm guessing Funimation didn't? Another good example of artistic credits flair, in an OP this time, comes from Moonphase; the JP credits added cat ears to many of the kanji, in keeping with the "Nekomimi Mode" song and the show's habit to adding cat ears to anything and everything. With the English credits on the alternate angle, Funi does deserve credit for replicating the spinning text effects, but... no nekomimi (The English-credits angle also has worse video quality in general, as seen with the added jaggies around Hazuki's wrists.) What's more, I believe those alternate angles were only in the 6-disc singles from 2006-07 and the 2008 set that repackaged them. Funi reauthored the series down to 4 discs for the later Viridian and SAVE collections, and likely only kept the English version. So if you want that nekomimi kanji, you're pretty much out of luck unless you resort to illegal means. To put it in tl;dr terms, the main objection many have to translated credits is not "Oh no the Japaneseness is gone!", it's "What else did they damage or omit from the video to get those English credits in there?"
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