Forum - View topicAnswerman - When Is It OK To Adapt An Anime Dub Script?
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Zalis116
Moderator
 Posts: 6868 Location: Kazune City |
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Showsni
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So what, are you telling me the English dub of Lum the Invader Girl isn't totally accurate?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6budgmrxpe4 I do think that sometimes just throwing out the original script and making up whatever you like can end up with a great show - I mean, look how much we love the Magic Roundabout. Of course, it's a different show to the original, rather than an attempt to localise the original, and that should be known by the viewers. |
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Scion Drake
Posts: 941 |
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There is a term called Woolseyism which means more or less “Stuff gets changed during translation to work better in the new language.”
You don’t necessarily have to translate a one for one adaptation, but it has to be comprehensible. Not everything in the original language can translated so sometimes you have to adapt it in a way that makes sense but still fits the original line. Essentially what’s important is keeping the spirit of the original. This is a universal concept, happens to every language, even oringslly English properties being translated to other languages. You can even change entire dialogues as long as it works & fits the scenario. An example in Dragon Ball Super is when Zamasu was conversing with his master Gowasu about the growth of mortals, the dub actually changed their conversation into a garden analogy. Here’s how it went. Gowasu: [original dub] We must wait for the mortals to learn, Zamasu. Zamasu: [original dub] Are we only to watch over them? When I was invited here, I thought I would learn justice from you. But is the gods "justice" purely watching others?! Gowasu: [Funimation] Patience, Zamasu. Every seed needs time to grow. Zamasu: [Funmation] Gardens are tended. Not just watched. Should a gardener not pluck the weed? When I was invited here, I thought you would teach me divine justice, but all you seem to do is just watch while these monsters stain existence with each other's blood. I feel like the change works well for the characters. Plus the dub have us hilarious lines like “Yeah, sure. Let's go see Yamcha" or “Iforgotmytractor” which weren’t even in the original source material. We would have never gotten those gems if we rigidilly stuck to translating the source material word for word so I’m glad they made the changes. |
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rizuchan
 Posts: 976 Location: Kansas |
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Your thinking here is exactly what Justin was trying to argue against when he said "There is no absolutely pure way of translating something, much as some of us might like to think otherwise." ""Shikata ga nai" is probably the expression you are talking about, and it is the perfect example. It is often translated as "it can't be helped" to the point people think of that expression as a Japanese stereotype. There is actually nothing 'Japanese' about that expression. "It can't be helped" is a British idiom. If you were to translate "Shikata (ga) nai" completely literally, it would be something like "[There's] no way". but it's used as an expression more like, "what's the use?" What I'm saying is, "It can't be helped" is not a remotely literal translation - it's actually an example of a localized translation that just happens to sound very stiff. I've said this a hundred times here, but I will keep screaming it from the tower tops every time the subject of (Japanese, particularly anime) translations comes up: a stiff-sounding translation is not a more accurate translation. Translating is an art, not math. You cannot write a formula that switches out one Japanese word for one English word. This is especially true for Japanese, because it has such a completely different grammar structure than English and because (from a native English speaker's perspective) it is incredibly vague and imprecise. That's not to say that I don't think there are translations that adapt too much - I could nitpick Liz and the Blue Bird's to death, as a recent example. But that's why translations are art and not math. If I sat down for a cup of coffee with the translator they could probably convince me their way of phrasing was for the better (assuming it wasn't bastardized in editing or something). |
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Kadmos1
 Posts: 13564 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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When you have instances like the the simuldub versions of "Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid", "Prison School", and "My First Girlfriend is a Gal", I think that is where the line is crossed as you are injecting your personal politics. True, there are times some of the home video versions will change those Eng. dub lines to something more faithful to what the Japanese lines. I don't know about firing the script writer for the simuldub, but giving those writers death threats on-line or harassing them about it also is bad.
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EricJ2
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Magic Roundabout??...Ohh, you're British!--That must mean you're referring to BBC's semi-gag dub of the first UY/Lum season, which couldn't decide whether it was a birth-of-anime underground discovery, or an Adult Swim-style goof-on. Wasn't sure which dub you were referring to, and had to check the link: Usually when most folk refer to "Dubbed UY/Lum", and saying it's futile and impossible to try and attempt it in its original form, they still think nothing had been created since AnimEigo's horrendous office-made "Those Annoying Aliens" fandub that was quickly abandoned in their early VHS days. But nobody recalls that AnimEigo in the late-90's/early-00's DVD days later went on to a professional-studio sub-accurate English dubs of the Movie and OVA features...Probably because the disks went OOP along with the rest of AE's UY catalog, and they'd probably now be lost forever if not for diligent fansites  :
https://urusei-yatsura.com/watch/movie-3-eng/ (Okay, Ryuunusuke with an actual series-appropriate voice, or "I've got a giant jelly-bean over my eyes"...Which do you feel does the show proper justice?) Unfortunately--getting back to the point--those had the same slight problem as CPM's "Beautiful Dreamer" dub, in that they decided it was "safer" for the voices to just read out the subtitle script, no matter how clunky or actor-unintuitive that hobbled the line delivery. Still, proved it COULD be done. |
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Chester McCool
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Yes, that sounds far more likely than a Japanese studio actively trashing on and insulting a creator's work.
"Woolseyism" is steeped in nostalgia, and thus, can not be trusted. There's people who were actually upset the new release of Symphony of the Night re-dubbed the dialog to not be a poorly acted Google translation, despite the fact if a modern game did that they'd no doubt be upset at such a low-quality dub. I didn't watch Super dubbed, but the clip I saw on YouTube made it sound like Vegeta was insecure and jealous of Yamcha, which is ridiculously out of character for him. Did the dub going back to the old days where Freeza wants to caress balls of joy and pop weasels? |
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BodaciousSpacePirate
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I really feel like we as a community don't give this the consideration it deserves. In the mid-00s, I had an acquaintance whose three favorite cartoons were South Park, Squidbillies, and the version of Shin-Chan that aired on Adult Swim. I had another friend who only liked anime "that didn't feel like anime", which basically meant stuff like Hetalia. Yet another friend marathoned the entirety of Sgt. Frog after she found out that it was dubbed in a similar fashion as Shin-Chan (and was constantly complaining that "the show would be so much better if they just got rid of all the anime girls"). Funimation was definitely not wrong to think that there was a market for content that was deliberately inaccurate or inappropriate. A part of me even believes that a significant chunk of the people who reacted most negatively to the Prison School thing were the same demographic who enjoyed Shin-Chan on Adult Swim back in the day. Despite all that, nowadays anime fans tend to have the expectation that we're going to get a "faithful" translation unless we're told otherwise ahead of time. We're a pretty reactionary community, it doesn't take much to set a lot of us off, and once someone feels like a translator "has an agenda" or is "trying to pull one over on fans", it's already too late to bring up the issue of translation being more art than science. People don't want to talk about the nature of language when they're mad. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. |
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Stuart Smith
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In your case, it sounds as if your friends are not really anime fans to begin with, but they enjoy it when an anime is treated like an American cartoon. Which then leads to the case of if there is a market for this, then it would mean licencors would be overlooking the anime fandom for the non-anime liking audience who watches Adult Swim or similar channels. I imagine anime fans would not be appreciative of that.
I believe this is a flawed justification because it hinges on the idea of the Japanese side caring about the American market beyond a paycheck. Given even Toei were perfectly fine with the old Dragon Ball and One Piece dubs being total hackjobs so long as they made the shows popular here and they got their royalties, I can't imagine most companies would actively step in and do something like that. Afterall, it's not their home market which matters to the Japanese fans. I can only think of two examples of where the original creator stepped in to prevent censorship and editing. Miyazaki after "Warriors of the Wind" telling Weinstein Co. not to edit his works, and Kazuki Takahashi forbidding Konami of America from censoring any of his artwork, which led to them simply not releasing certain cards in the western card game. -Stuart Smith |
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Nilrem
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I've never quite understood the argument that one translation, or one way of translation is better than another, as it will always depend on so many factors starting with how much of the original culture your audience understand, and how deeply they understand it.
If you start off with the assumption that everyone has a "deep" understanding and thinks of it the same way you do, people, even those who are very familiar with it, will likely not get some things. What I mean is, that even when something starts off in the same language, people from a different geographical region, different time, or who use the language slightly differently don't always get the context, especially things like jokes and references that expect you to know the background. As an example as a Brit I've often noticed how differently the US uses certain words, which can mean a Joke based on a UK use of words may not be obvious to an American as the "culture" that accompanies it hasn't travelled as widely towards the US (it doesn't seem quite so bad the other way, probably because we get so much US "culture" by way of TV and film so we are exposed by default to a lot of the background ideas/tropes/word use but there are still times I won't get a reference until I've watched it a second time, or thought about it). Even just things like time affects how well something is understood within the same same language and reason, as much as I grew to hate Shakespeare due to months spent analysing it, by the time I'd finished I understood and picked up on a lot of the subtleties that I'd have missed otherwise (and that leads to picking up references in later works). When you start to think of word games and euphemisms things get even more complicated as they often require an extremely good understanding of the original language and context. An example of one that got me for years, was one of my sister's friends was always referred to as "Boris", it wasn't until I'd known her for about 10 years I found out that she was called it because when she was in high school Boris Becker was playing at Wimbledon (so by Cockney Rhyming slang rules, Rebecca = Boris Becker which is shortened to Boris). In direct relation to anime, going back something like 15 years I remember there being an argument on one forum about the bra size mentioned for an anime character (of all things) as being "wrong" in the American DVD release (I've got a feeling it was Chobits?), which turned out to be a fansub had used the literal translation which was of the Japanese sizing. IIRC the US release had translated it to being the US sizing which was a completely sensible decision as if it had been left as originally said it would have meant something different to the "localised" audience*. It's one that always stuck in my mind as it was such a silly argument, and well, Bra's.  
For some reason I couldn't imagine the same argument arising if someone had made a translation from French of German that involved shoe sizes  (although it is far more obvious, given US12 is EU46)
In short, I'd much rather a translation that is accessible and works in the target language, than a completely "accurate" (depending on whose translation you believe**) that doesn't "scan" as working or leaves out the context because you're expected to know some subtle joke or reference that only someone who has spent decades studying/living the language will know, especially if there is a suitable comparable reference you can make that will get the message across. *I was surprised there are something like 5 different standards, and they're not just as simple as one using metric, another using imperial, as an A cup can be an AA or a B depending on country but at different measurements of A, and D can be D, DD or E all at the same measurement but different systems. **Given there are still new translations of things like 2000 year old Texts on a regular basis, there can be plenty to choose from;)) |
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Kadmos1
Posts: 13564 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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I remember a YT video with Greg Ayres (this was 10-11 years back on one of his anti-fan sub panels I think) mentioning "Nerima Daikon Brothers". He even said that Nabeshin (Japanese director) was actually involved with approving some of the jokes for the Eng. dub. Translations don't always have to be very literal and there are times where added-in lines are justified for the Eng. dub script. Personally, if I was a professional translator, I would want the script to match the spirit/letter of the Japanese script by at least 85%-90%.
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tsukikage85
Posts: 14 |
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Can you say "Shinesman"?
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