Why is it always subs over dubs?
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Personally, it depends on the quality. Final Fantasy Advent Children is a perfect example. I prefer having subtitles on and Japanese audio, because the voice acting is a lot better (mainly when that emo looking dude is crying out MOOOTHEEEEER! Jap version has more...emotion...in it). Whereas, say, Hellsing Ultimate series, the English voice actor rapes the living hell out of anything that jap guy ever did. Although Seras still sounds whiny.
I'm not an ultra fan of anime, and just watch the ones I do because I like them, not because they're from Japan, or better than State animated series, and other bollocks explanations the Nurotu fanboys rant and rave about...
I'm not an ultra fan of anime, and just watch the ones I do because I like them, not because they're from Japan, or better than State animated series, and other bollocks explanations the Nurotu fanboys rant and rave about...
it's a case by case basis for me. if the dub is good, i'll watch either version (FMA, GITS, evangelion, etc.). if it's bad (naruto, higurashi) i'll watch it subbed only.
I think personally Subs, unless the Dubs are really well done. I'm alright with reading, I hate being annoyed by a voice though. I once tried watching the dubbed version of kung fu hustle, I had just had to start the dvd again with subtitles it was so bad.
Because with subs you generally get the least offending voices to the ear with the least alterations with the show. Not always though.
Black Lagoon is an example of a show that had a dub team actually give a shit about the anime. Each voice sounds like a perfect match to the character and its synced up perfectly.
Anything by Studio Ghibli has masterful dubbing as well, then again Disney is funding the Dubbs so they can actually afford to get some nice talent. Jim Bulushi, Billy Bob Thorton, and the woman who plays skinners Mom. Once again the people working on the movies actually give two shits about the anime and have put effort into making it great. Thus the dubs are awesome.
However take a look at Ouran Highschool Host Club. The Dub's on that one are quite honestly... awful. The voices do not match the characters at all. Mostly being that Tamaki, the least snobbish of all the main characters next to Honey and Mori has the most snobbish voice in the god damn show. So it pisses people off.
Then there are shows that translate an Osakan accent into a Texan accent.
Don't get me wrong, i have no fucking clue what the difference between a regular accent and an Osakan accent in japan is. Politically Texas may be an equivalent to Osaka. All i know is it sounds fucking terrible. In Azu managa Daioh when i heard Osaka(the nick name they gave to the girl with an Osakan Accent, der) with a high energy Texan cowgirl voice i almost recoiled since it was the polar opposite of her character.
Then you get shit like what happened With CCS. The alterations between the two series are completely cringe worthy.
Black Lagoon is an example of a show that had a dub team actually give a shit about the anime. Each voice sounds like a perfect match to the character and its synced up perfectly.
Anything by Studio Ghibli has masterful dubbing as well, then again Disney is funding the Dubbs so they can actually afford to get some nice talent. Jim Bulushi, Billy Bob Thorton, and the woman who plays skinners Mom. Once again the people working on the movies actually give two shits about the anime and have put effort into making it great. Thus the dubs are awesome.
However take a look at Ouran Highschool Host Club. The Dub's on that one are quite honestly... awful. The voices do not match the characters at all. Mostly being that Tamaki, the least snobbish of all the main characters next to Honey and Mori has the most snobbish voice in the god damn show. So it pisses people off.
Then there are shows that translate an Osakan accent into a Texan accent.
Don't get me wrong, i have no fucking clue what the difference between a regular accent and an Osakan accent in japan is. Politically Texas may be an equivalent to Osaka. All i know is it sounds fucking terrible. In Azu managa Daioh when i heard Osaka(the nick name they gave to the girl with an Osakan Accent, der) with a high energy Texan cowgirl voice i almost recoiled since it was the polar opposite of her character.
Then you get shit like what happened With CCS. The alterations between the two series are completely cringe worthy.
I find the voice acting in dubs to be disappointing. It feels like the voices don't match the characters. But there are good dubs out there.
Well it's two things, mainly.
For one, most dubs still suck. I know Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Fooly Cooly, and a few others have good voice acting, but the absolute majority of dubs are still horribly acted. Naruto's dub makes me want to cut my ears off. Anime like Outlaw Star screw up by trying to make some of the voices (namely Melfina) try too hard to sound like the Japanese voices: the fact is, the inflection and tone of Japanese speech and characters almost always sounds like crap when inserted in English dialogue. There are many common mistakes (and just bad voice actors) that contribute to this, and the fact remains that the vast majority of dubs absolutely suck.
The second most common issue is translation and pronunciation. In many cases, the translation of the dubs fails miserably where the subs succeed. Take Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children for example. Cloud spends the movie, and the two years preceding it, unable to forgive himself for Aerith's death. He's dragging the emotional burden of his guilt the entire time. In a pivotal scene, Tifa accuses him of this simply by saying twice a Japanese word that, in the culture, means that one is dragging something. But rather than communicating that, the translators for the dub had her say, "Dilly-dally-shilly-shally." Um... what? Unless you're watching Advent Children Complete, which released years after the original, there is no real explanation in the movie for exactly why Cloud is having such problems, and this pivotal scene where Cloud understands that he is dragging an emotional burden replaces the most important word of the entire movie to "DIlly-dally-shilly-shally?" Dilly-dallying doesn't even mean anything close to "dragging" in the first place! I missed the entire point of that film until I saw Advent Children Complete with subtitles, all because the translators failed immensely. To use another example, Orphen (an anime that actually has pretty good English voice acting) had a much more complex story that was dumbed down in the English version by nothing more than a bad translation. The villain had layers of character development completely stripped away, resulting in a more simple story than was originally intended. Even the classics of your childhood: remember the first Pokemon film? The one about Mewtwo? Originally, Mewtwo was confused, and his motivations were rather complex in their lack of understanding, and this was communicated throughout the film. In the English dub, he is pretty much just a purely evil guy who wants nothing more than revenge, and any complexity of thought or confusion on his part comes out only in the end, during the monologue about peace and love (which, by the way, was much more pronounced and melodramatic than the original; and when we take something Japanese and make it more melodramatic, you know something is very, very wrong).
Beyond that, too many dubs change some of the terms and such that really should be the same. To use Naruto as another example (dang, was that show badly dubbed), they translated many things that should have stayed the same. For instance, the name of the village, Konoha. It means "leaf," and was translated as such. However, most subs still leave it as "Konoha." Why? Because names like that are much more mysterious and fitting to a fictional fantasy world than "Leaf Village." Translating it exactly in that case just sounds stupid: it's true that most of the ninja villages in that manga/anime are named after elemental entities, but that is caught on through the rest of it. Same with Naruto's techniques. Kage Bunshin no Jutsu makes for a much more mysterious, magical feel than the Shadow Clone Technique. The translators went too far.
As for pronunciation, this is just horrifying. Japanese has different translation patterns than English; different syllables will be stressed, vowels will often be pronounced differently... as a result, names often have a different sound. But many dubs completely disregard this, either changing the names to sound more American or simply pronouncing them in ways that simply sound stupid. A recent example would be the dubbing of Clannad (a brilliant show that I guarantee will make you cry, no matter who you are). It was a mostly decent dub, but the names sounded terrible. One character is named Nagisa, which, in Japanese, is pronounced NA-gi-sa. In the English dub, everyone said Na GEE-sa. Another character, Okazaki, should be pronounced O-KA-za-ki. Everyone in the dub calls him "O-ka-ZA-ki." Try saying these out loud: they sound absolutely ridiculous. Similar travesties happened in Digimon Tamers: for example, the main character, Takato, rather than being said TA-ka-to, is referred to as Ta-KA-to. Shikamaru, from Naruto, rather than being called Shi-KA-ma-ru, is pronounced Shi-ka-MA-ru. Rather than having names that, while definitely not American, at least sound foreign, we have crap that just sounds stupid.
I would also like to point out a much more rare, but still infuriating practice: soundtrack changes. My personal favorite example is Digimon Tamers, which actually had a great soundtrack and some really awesome J-rock and J-pop. The dub changed that. They did not use a single track from the original music, and instead had a musical score that may as well have been taken directly from a random royalty-free music website. Even the opening and closing themes changed...
When I saw the English dub after loving the subbed version of Tamers, I was horrified.
The fact is, most anime dubs are terrible, because the voice actors suck, the translation screws with the story, and/or the pronunciations just sound terrible. There are exceptions, and I will not judge someone simply because they watch dubbed anime. But I prefer subs in almost every situation, simply because I have very rarely seen a good dub.
For one, most dubs still suck. I know Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Fooly Cooly, and a few others have good voice acting, but the absolute majority of dubs are still horribly acted. Naruto's dub makes me want to cut my ears off. Anime like Outlaw Star screw up by trying to make some of the voices (namely Melfina) try too hard to sound like the Japanese voices: the fact is, the inflection and tone of Japanese speech and characters almost always sounds like crap when inserted in English dialogue. There are many common mistakes (and just bad voice actors) that contribute to this, and the fact remains that the vast majority of dubs absolutely suck.
The second most common issue is translation and pronunciation. In many cases, the translation of the dubs fails miserably where the subs succeed. Take Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children for example. Cloud spends the movie, and the two years preceding it, unable to forgive himself for Aerith's death. He's dragging the emotional burden of his guilt the entire time. In a pivotal scene, Tifa accuses him of this simply by saying twice a Japanese word that, in the culture, means that one is dragging something. But rather than communicating that, the translators for the dub had her say, "Dilly-dally-shilly-shally." Um... what? Unless you're watching Advent Children Complete, which released years after the original, there is no real explanation in the movie for exactly why Cloud is having such problems, and this pivotal scene where Cloud understands that he is dragging an emotional burden replaces the most important word of the entire movie to "DIlly-dally-shilly-shally?" Dilly-dallying doesn't even mean anything close to "dragging" in the first place! I missed the entire point of that film until I saw Advent Children Complete with subtitles, all because the translators failed immensely. To use another example, Orphen (an anime that actually has pretty good English voice acting) had a much more complex story that was dumbed down in the English version by nothing more than a bad translation. The villain had layers of character development completely stripped away, resulting in a more simple story than was originally intended. Even the classics of your childhood: remember the first Pokemon film? The one about Mewtwo? Originally, Mewtwo was confused, and his motivations were rather complex in their lack of understanding, and this was communicated throughout the film. In the English dub, he is pretty much just a purely evil guy who wants nothing more than revenge, and any complexity of thought or confusion on his part comes out only in the end, during the monologue about peace and love (which, by the way, was much more pronounced and melodramatic than the original; and when we take something Japanese and make it more melodramatic, you know something is very, very wrong).
Beyond that, too many dubs change some of the terms and such that really should be the same. To use Naruto as another example (dang, was that show badly dubbed), they translated many things that should have stayed the same. For instance, the name of the village, Konoha. It means "leaf," and was translated as such. However, most subs still leave it as "Konoha." Why? Because names like that are much more mysterious and fitting to a fictional fantasy world than "Leaf Village." Translating it exactly in that case just sounds stupid: it's true that most of the ninja villages in that manga/anime are named after elemental entities, but that is caught on through the rest of it. Same with Naruto's techniques. Kage Bunshin no Jutsu makes for a much more mysterious, magical feel than the Shadow Clone Technique. The translators went too far.
As for pronunciation, this is just horrifying. Japanese has different translation patterns than English; different syllables will be stressed, vowels will often be pronounced differently... as a result, names often have a different sound. But many dubs completely disregard this, either changing the names to sound more American or simply pronouncing them in ways that simply sound stupid. A recent example would be the dubbing of Clannad (a brilliant show that I guarantee will make you cry, no matter who you are). It was a mostly decent dub, but the names sounded terrible. One character is named Nagisa, which, in Japanese, is pronounced NA-gi-sa. In the English dub, everyone said Na GEE-sa. Another character, Okazaki, should be pronounced O-KA-za-ki. Everyone in the dub calls him "O-ka-ZA-ki." Try saying these out loud: they sound absolutely ridiculous. Similar travesties happened in Digimon Tamers: for example, the main character, Takato, rather than being said TA-ka-to, is referred to as Ta-KA-to. Shikamaru, from Naruto, rather than being called Shi-KA-ma-ru, is pronounced Shi-ka-MA-ru. Rather than having names that, while definitely not American, at least sound foreign, we have crap that just sounds stupid.
I would also like to point out a much more rare, but still infuriating practice: soundtrack changes. My personal favorite example is Digimon Tamers, which actually had a great soundtrack and some really awesome J-rock and J-pop. The dub changed that. They did not use a single track from the original music, and instead had a musical score that may as well have been taken directly from a random royalty-free music website. Even the opening and closing themes changed...
When I saw the English dub after loving the subbed version of Tamers, I was horrified.
The fact is, most anime dubs are terrible, because the voice actors suck, the translation screws with the story, and/or the pronunciations just sound terrible. There are exceptions, and I will not judge someone simply because they watch dubbed anime. But I prefer subs in almost every situation, simply because I have very rarely seen a good dub.
If it is dubbed good then I watch it dubbed. If the the dub came out like crap, then I will try to track down the subbed version.
Dubs have been going either way for years now. I am watching the Last Exile series, and I am perfectly happy with the dub quality.
Dubs have been going either way for years now. I am watching the Last Exile series, and I am perfectly happy with the dub quality.
Dilly-Dally-Shilly-Shally means your dragging your ass and your behind everyone else because your to distracted by something else, usually daydreaming. In other words Cloud is living in the past because he can't stop thinking about Aerith's death.Thaius said:
It's an artistic translation rather then a literal one.
...It made sense to me? It replaces Tifa saying Zurro Zurro, which is a Japanese phrase meaning the same thing just about.
I am usually a fan of dubs but that was just terrible. Sonohara sounds like a 10 year old.Marik2 said:
Good dubs are found in lots of places. I will make a list of the good dubbed anime I know:
Cowboy Bebop Wolf's Rain
Samurai Champloo FMA Brotherhood
Scrapped Princess Full Metal Panic
Darker than Black Bleach
BECK Mongolian Chop Squad Fate/Stay Night
Ghost in the Shell Trigun
FLCL Soul Eater
Baccano! Code Geass
That is all I can think of for now.
SnootyEnglishman said:
so far I have found the Funimation dubs to be pretty good with no censorship in sight. of coarse I havent seen alot but what I have seen seems up to par.
as for 4kids....I have nightmares of the things they do...
I prefer subbed because they tend to say a bit more. For example, if you listen to Resident Evil 5's dialog during the game, it's pretty shitty.
Almost everything they say hardly makes any sense because they're trying to match a tiny sentence with the moments of the mouthes. [Super] Street Fighter IV has really bad English dub. Just watch that mouth move out of sync.
That's why. I prefer to have two seconds of dialog say:
Japanese sub: "I'm sorry, but your sister has met an unfortunate accident..."
versus
English dub: "I killed your...sister."
You get more out of the story.
Almost everything they say hardly makes any sense because they're trying to match a tiny sentence with the moments of the mouthes. [Super] Street Fighter IV has really bad English dub. Just watch that mouth move out of sync.
That's why. I prefer to have two seconds of dialog say:
Japanese sub: "I'm sorry, but your sister has met an unfortunate accident..."
versus
English dub: "I killed your...sister."
You get more out of the story.