To those who prefer Japanese voices...

Necroid_Neko

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Nov 24, 2011
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I prefer my own language as I can understand it without subtitles, so if the English voices are good I'll listen in English. However, if the dub is badly translated/has too many whiny voices/is (I feel) inappropriate to the character or isn't acted well then I'll listen in Japanese.
 

Optiluiz

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I always always always watch/play things in their original language. That's how they were meant to be seen/played. If it were up to me, I'd also learn french to read the original version of Les Miserables or Swedish to read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

It's not the same when someone translates things. I know because I've done some translating work myself, and a lot of information gets lost, no matter how good you are at it.
 

370999

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May 17, 2010
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Depends.

Usually the original language is better. So usually japanese in this case is better. however I can't speak Japanese, which means I miss out a lot of the nuances of the conserversations when they are subbed. I also finding subbing doesn't work fpor comedies, it messes up the timing of jokes and stuff. I also can't really tell the difference between a good or bad performance in Japanese, well I think I can but it has to be preetty piss poor.

So generally watch it subbed. However if it is a show which is better suited to localisation (i.e. a japanese game set in the US or featuring a lot of english speaking characters) or with a stellar cast of dub actors (Cowboy Bebop) along with miscelenous (spelling?) reasons (BECK has Japanese american characters acted by japanese people who speak english and it sounds dire) I prefer the dub. So pretty much a 90/10 ratio in favour of subbing.
 

CrazyGirl17

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Sep 11, 2009
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Personally, I prefer my anime and the like in English, but I'm not against the occasional sub...
 

Rinshan Kaihou

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There are precious few anime where the english dub is anything but atrocious. The only one I can think of is Ouran, which is average at best. By and large the voice acting is awful, it's the same voice actors (Seriously, watch 10 dubbed anime and you will find the same voice actors in pretty much all of them). And just awful script writing. I far prefer watching it in the original japanese with subtitles.
 

King of Asgaard

Vae Victis, Woe to the Conquered
Oct 31, 2011
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Personally, I only feel the need to hear the original Japanese voices if the English dub is terrible.
It ususally is tolerable but sometimes, some games' English renders it unplayable.
 

Weaver

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Apr 28, 2008
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Vykrel said:
i have another question, for the MANY of you who prefer japanese rather than english dubs...

do you guys understand Japanese? i mean, the biggest complaint about english dubs that ive heard is that the acting is poor. how do you know the Japanese acting isnt crappy too? is it just the inflection and tone of their words that seems better?

i know everyone has their preferences, but i just dont understand the logic behind this one. if an anime/game has crappy english voice actors, i usually avoid it. but if i didnt, i dont think changing the language would be more preferable.
I don't know Japanese, but I actually feel I can tell when someone is acting poorly.
Have you seen Battle Royal? It's a low budget movie from Japan and some scenes just have terrible acting. Even if it's in a different language, humans seem pretty good at picking up emotion and facial expressions.

Or let's say something like Disgaea 4 (i keep bringing it up because I'm playing it right now). The Japanese acting in that is incredibly hammy, and it's hammy on purpose. The game is very comedic so seeing the main character deliver an over the top, super serious speech about some trivial thing is quite humerous. Even if you don't speak the language I feel it's easy to pick up on the intentionality.
 

CrystalShadow

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Apr 11, 2009
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Strain42 said:
This is a legitimate question. I'm not trying to mock anyone's opinion. I'm looking for a serious answer.

I play a lot of Atlus games, and one of the things I hear most often is something along the lines of "I wish Atlus would include a dual audio option. I want the original Japanese voices."

Now let me ask something. What exactly does that mean? Does it just mean the first voices recorded? To explain further, let me use two Atlus games as an example. Devil Survivor: Overclocked and Catherine.

Devil Survivor: Overclocked is a very rare case (the first for Atlus, I believe) of a game that came out in the states first. Granted, only by a couple days, but the game was released in English first. Do you prefer the English voices because they would be the original voices, or would you still prefer Japanese voices because these are all Japanese characters and it would be more realistic?

On the exact opposite side of the coin, we have Catherine. Catherine was released in Japan first and so the Japanese recordings were first and would be considered the original. But these are all American characters who realistically would be speaking English.

Or do neither of those points really matter at all and some people just automatically want Japanese voices because they think they sound better (I've noticed even acting considered pretty bad in a foreign language is still often praised by English audiences)

Thoughts? (from anyone, not just people who prefer Japanese acting)
I'm not sure either of those cases is always the main reason. As someone who actually does speak several languages, I can tell you some things really don't translate very well from one to another.

And dubs, even if they're CGI or animated, suffer from this even more, because what's being said has to fit the mouth movements used, which makes the already arduous task of translating something without it sounding stupid even more difficult.

The question of dubs to me is sometimes about the quality of the acting, but most of the time it's the weird things that happen to try and get a translation that both makes sense, and fits the mouth movements.

So the question becomes, what language was the script originally written in? And what language was the animation created for?

Now, you might legitimately ask why this isn't as big of an issue with subtitles? Well, it still is. I know this from listening to something in one language, with subtitles in a second language that I also understand. It can get... Strange at times, especially with words and phrases that don't have obvious translations.

But the thing is, subtitles don't have to match the mouth movements, or what is actually being said 100% exactly, so there is much more leeway to create a translation that actually makes sense, rather than one which just happens to fit the animation.

Though I have to say sometimes it just comes down to personal preference. I'll often listen to things in multiple languages, and make up my mind afterwards which I prefer.
(Nostalgia and what you're used to is also an issue. After watching 50 episodes of an Anime in Japanese, I found the english dub strange, and the same can be said of a series I'd only heard in english for the most part.
For that matter, I watched the Little Mermaid when I was 6 in dutch, and to this day still prefer that to the English version, even though the dutch version is obviously not the original.)
 

Bento Box

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Strain42 said:
This is a legitimate question. I'm not trying to mock anyone's opinion. I'm looking for a serious answer.

I play a lot of Atlus games, and one of the things I hear most often is something along the lines of "I wish Atlus would include a dual audio option. I want the original Japanese voices."

Now let me ask something. What exactly does that mean? Does it just mean the first voices recorded? To explain further, let me use two Atlus games as an example. Devil Survivor: Overclocked and Catherine.

Devil Survivor: Overclocked is a very rare case (the first for Atlus, I believe) of a game that came out in the states first. Granted, only by a couple days, but the game was released in English first. Do you prefer the English voices because they would be the original voices, or would you still prefer Japanese voices because these are all Japanese characters and it would be more realistic?

On the exact opposite side of the coin, we have Catherine. Catherine was released in Japan first and so the Japanese recordings were first and would be considered the original. But these are all American characters who realistically would be speaking English.

Or do neither of those points really matter at all and some people just automatically want Japanese voices because they think they sound better (I've noticed even acting considered pretty bad in a foreign language is still often praised by English audiences)

Thoughts? (from anyone, not just people who prefer Japanese acting)
My experience is less with games, and more with anime, but I think the reasoning will hold firm in both cases.

I don't much care for subtitles; they draw my attention away from the action on screen, even if only briefly. Sometimes, though, they're a necessary evil, especially in games, where you'd rather not play through the whole cutscene again just to clarify a word here and there. That said, I really, really hate English dubs, and very much prefer the original Japanese, subtitled. It took me a long time to figure out why -- embarrassingly long, in fact, as the answer really is there in plain sight, if you give it a moment's proper thought (which I guess means that my thoughts weren't proper or something. wut).

Japanese game makers make Japanese games for Japanese people.

"Yeah, no shit."

No, hold on.

Japanese doesn't sound like English. It really couldn't be further removed from the Latin and Germanic conventions that form our language base. The syntax is almost exactly backwards ("That kitten is adorable," versus, "As for that kitten over there, adorable, to be."). Aside from the 'n' sound, there's not a single consonant in the language that doesn't come with a vowel attached to its ass. The cadence is a much more pronounced staccato that pretty much any western language with the possible exception of pure German and some of the harsher Slavic languages.

But it doesn't end at the language barrier -- the idealized archetypal heroes of Japanese history and myth are revered as powerful warriors as well as verbose poets and learned philosophers. This comes across plain as day when you watch many of their action flicks, where the hero and the villain have themselves a calm gloating match just before laying into each other with their gimmick weapons of choice, and pause frequently in the heat of battle to recap, in brilliant detail, why each is the cleverer or stronger, and sure to win.

The language and culture barriers are deep and wide in those two senses, and while there have been a few examples lauded as triumphs of translation, it really is a monumental task to take such disparate styles of dialogue and try to make one sound like the other. What you usually get instead is a stumbling mess of failed lip synch, whose clumsiness is only made more starkly obvious when there are plethorae of "named techniques," and the dubbing company decides to leave the original Japanese names in there.

EKUZIBITTO NAN-BA WAN: A memorable scene from a popular anime about samurai ghosts: Do it. Sit through the whole thing. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdsAVqx75rA]

Isn't that a clumsy mess of Japanglish? Of course, in the original Japanese, "full release" and "a ten thousand cherry blossoms" translate to, well, "full release" and "ten thousand cherry blossoms," but in that dub, the listener is jarred by the sudden use of alien words: words that are likely alien even to the poor guy saying them. They don't make sense, because they're taken out of their natural context, and to make things worse, they still come out smoother than the almost necessarily Shatner-esque delivery of the badass boast [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BadassBoast] coming from the calm antagonist.

Now, of course, for some folks reading is just not their strength. For others the actual properties of spoken word are a non-starter. For those folks dubbing is just fine, but me, I'm a language nut (SPOILER), and so listening to some poor schmuck -- who might do fantastic voice work in a more conventional setting -- stumble over terrible lip movement in the source material and nigh-arbitrary language changes in the script, makes me cringe. Games or TV, doesn't matter: dialogue is dialogue, and the same hurdles to translation exist in each.
 

Havok2099

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Aug 24, 2011
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My preference for voice acting varies, for anime always go for the sub, but with video games it depends on which cast I think sounds better.
Using an atlus example, I preferred the Japanese voice acting in Persona 3, yet at the same time I infinetly prefer Persona 4's English dub because Teddy in Japanese makes me cry tears of blood every time he speaks.
 

Tiamattt

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Vykrel said:
i have another question, for the MANY of you who prefer japanese rather than english dubs...

do you guys understand Japanese? i mean, the biggest complaint about english dubs that ive heard is that the acting is poor. how do you know the Japanese acting isnt crappy too? is it just the inflection and tone of their words that seems better?

i know everyone has their preferences, but i just dont understand the logic behind this one. if an anime/game has crappy english voice actors, i usually avoid it. but if i didnt, i dont think changing the language would be more preferable.

Nope, other then simple as hell stuff like hello, brother/mom/father/sister or idiot my knowledge of Japanese is nada. While it's probably a little harder to tell if a foreign VA is doing a bad job if a VA is sucking at their job your ears will usually pick up on it. Like if their emotions are flat, voices are too squeaky and/or annoying. tone not making the scene, etc etc. No matter what language a VA is speaking if they're trash then we can pick up on that easily.

If the alternative language just plain > the crappy English VAs then you'll be surprised how much of a different it makes. Voices makes a ton of difference when watching/playing something and trying to tolerate crappy VAs just hurts the overall experience. If the alternate makes it's it so the anime/game doesn't hurt your ears anymore then you can actually enjoy it compared to trying to sit through it in pain, or in your case avoiding it.
 

Zethis

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Apr 25, 2008
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So what's the problem? Just put 5 languages (Lost Odyssey for example: Japanese, English, German, French, Italian if I remember correctly...) and let us choose. Blu Ray Discs should have enough space for more than one audio track.
 

A Shadows Age

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Mar 30, 2011
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Strain42 said:
This is a legitimate question. I'm not trying to mock anyone's opinion. I'm looking for a serious answer.

I play a lot of Atlus games, and one of the things I hear most often is something along the lines of "I wish Atlus would include a dual audio option. I want the original Japanese voices."

Now let me ask something. What exactly does that mean? Does it just mean the first voices recorded? To explain further, let me use two Atlus games as an example. Devil Survivor: Overclocked and Catherine.

Devil Survivor: Overclocked is a very rare case (the first for Atlus, I believe) of a game that came out in the states first. Granted, only by a couple days, but the game was released in English first. Do you prefer the English voices because they would be the original voices, or would you still prefer Japanese voices because these are all Japanese characters and it would be more realistic?

On the exact opposite side of the coin, we have Catherine. Catherine was released in Japan first and so the Japanese recordings were first and would be considered the original. But these are all American characters who realistically would be speaking English.

Or do neither of those points really matter at all and some people just automatically want Japanese voices because they think they sound better (I've noticed even acting considered pretty bad in a foreign language is still often praised by English audiences)

Thoughts? (from anyone, not just people who prefer Japanese acting)
Depends on the quality of the dubs, I usually prefer Japanese voice actors because they're performances are consistently of good quality. But watching a good dub is always amazing and makes whatever I'm watching memorable. For instance watching trigun in subs is like watching an entirely different show, the jokes, topics, and context all seem to shift to different points and the atmosphere changes completely.

To illustrate, in the dubbed version the second episode is one of my favorites, while in the subbed version the episode where the get jumped by bots on a bus in the desert is. Simply because of the way the dialogue is altered. Somebody who doesn't know how to voice act in a show, is like someone who doesn't know how to sing on a concert stage, cringe worthy...
 

CrimsonBlaze

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Aug 29, 2011
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I'll agree that some voice acting is better when it is done in the native tongue from which the production originates from. A lot of the dialogue, jokes, cultural references, and emotional outbursts makes much more sense to those who are familiar with it and it is often times not the same when translated to another language (English being the usual culprit).

There are some productions in which I prefer the Original (i.e. Japanese) dub (i.e. Bleach), the translated (i.e. English) dub (i.e. Dragon Ball franchise), and where I enjoy both/several (i.e. Japanese and English) dubs (i.e. Eureka Seven).

Then there a few for which I can't stand the voice acting at all (i.e. Naruto franchise. YES, Naruto!!) and therefore, do not watch the Anime at all. I only read the manga, watch the fighting scenes of the Anime in mute, and only play the games for the fighting aspect of the games.
 

rekabdarb

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Jun 25, 2008
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Zachary Amaranth said:
rekabdarb said:
I'm gonna bring up Gurren Lagann.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WVfs1FAs10&feature=sh_e_se&list=SL

Watch that episode and right around [censored] dies listen to the emotion of the voice actor

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSQww1GOSy8

Then watch this (ignore the spanish subs) and just listen to it. The voice actor has soooo much more emotion.
It'd probably help if you added a time to jump to for people who don't want to watch the whole episode.
The problem would be having to watch gurren lagann in english. YEAAAH i'm good on that one
 

Kreka_X

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Jan 31, 2011
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I prefer hearing a show in its native language, for example something like... Neon Genesis Evangelion I prefer in Japanease. Where as Hellsing I listen to it in in English. Its just more authentic. As for the better vpoce work, personally i think its a mix of imagination and the actual voice acting. Like how you read a book and create voices, so to speak, for the characters. In different languages you pick up the emotions, the pauses, the intesity, relaxedness, stress, etc... in there voice and your brain does the rest of the work. Kinda like how you voice sounds better in your own head but when you listen to it... ugh. Kinda.
Hope I made a little sense.
 

DarthSmiley

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Feb 16, 2011
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I watch a lot of anime and I've seen a lot of them in both English and Japanese.. And I prefer the Japanese voices. Every. Time.

I'll admit that some of the English dubs are really, really good, but it comes down to this..

Whether it's an animation, tv show, movie or game, I will ALWAYS prefer watching/seeing it in the original language it was done in (whether it be Japanese, Spanish, French, Canadian.. just joking :D), I'll take subtitles over dubbing any day.

It's just more authentic that way, I prefer experiencing something exactly as the creators made it. Whether the acting is bad or not doesn't matter to me.
 

Xaio30

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Nov 24, 2010
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Sometimes it's just more interesting to hear NPCs speak in a foreign language.
I recently switched my Steam to Japanese so I could play Skyrim with Japanese voices!