Blanket dismissal of anime dubs

Stormtroper

Fuck you.

Nyah, y'all just jelly because your voice actors have no feelings and your Homer is called Jomer.

I think it's one of the better-sounding languages I've heard, especially compared with English and Spanish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjutgQ6VjNg

nohaynicklibre

You are the one to talk, Homero.

1492 we fuk ur mathers 12 october best day of my life

Stormtroper

How many Battles of Carabobo have you guys won? Yeah, thought so.

JHM

Pretty sure you aren't. Lots of people hate that dub.

Hell, I like the dub and I watched it that way first, and I would still say it works better in Japanese.

I've also heard a bunch of people say that they prefer the English track, although I get the feeling that it comes down to who I was talking to versus who you were talking to. Both are really good, appropriately cast dubs; I just happen to think that the Japanese is funnier and more natural. Plus, you know, Norio Wakamoto.

Speaking of which, his turn as the troubadour demon in Mononoke was a mini tour-de-force. Seriously, he's a halibut that uses a banjo (OK, a shamisen) to make people hallucinate their worst fears. He appears in one scene and then vanishes. This should be stupid. It isn't. It is creepy and awesome.

Nyktos

Both are really good, appropriately cast dubs; I just happen to think that the Japanese is funnier and more natural.

Well, I agree with that. The English cast is great. It's largely the dub's script that makes me prefer the sub.

JHM

By the way: Go watch Mononoke. Now. The stories are like if Samuel Beckett wrote a Noh drama and had David Lynch direct it; the art is like moving watercolours and cutouts on rice-paper screens. In other words, it will confuse the daylights out of you, but you will feel confused in the most awesome way possible.

JHM

^^ True point. A lot of what makes Azumanga Daioh funny in Japanese does not translate well, and some of the adaptive choices just didn't work. Other shows have nailed the adaptive comedy thing in dub—Ouran High School Host Club is hilarious in both languages, for instance—but it's hard to pull off without taking serious liberties.

Noimporta

I think dubs, have, in general, reached a level of quality that I will choose them over subs every time I think it's more fitting for the type of show I'm watching. That is, for stuff like Cowboy Bebop and DtB, I'll watch a dub, but if some theoretical Hyouge Mono dub existed, I'd still watch the subs (provided they also existed).

DYRE

Hyouge Mono is most of the way subbed!

glennmagusharvey

Is that Serbian DBZ dub just really that bad or is the audio just desynced?

In this context I thought he was referring to 'idols' who were big VAs.  They tend to have everything idols do.

Dunno what you mean by this.

I'm the opposite, I find Japanese to sound better than American English. I guess it's because the phonology is similar to Spanish's

Strangely, I find Japanese to be meh-sounding (neither like nor dislike) but I kinda like the sound of Spanish.

I've never had any problem reading the subtitles while concentrating on the video. And not just for anime.

I sometimes find myself pausing to read the text if there's a lot of it going by quickly, but then again I sometimes find myself pausing and rewinding to re-hear the audio too.

Specific example that came to mind when I read this is Midori in My-HiME. I didn't like how high-pitched she sounded in Japanese, if I recall correctly.

I've been watching mostly in Japanese (in contrast to you) and I think she sounds...okay.  Wait, she's significantly older than the rest of the cast?  I guess that would make sense since she's, like, a grad student or something.  But she sure doesn't sound that way.

I'm very middle-of-the-road with respect to this issue. Some shows simply sound better in Japanese or English, or need to be in one or the other to best serve the story. Something like Baccano! works best with period slang and silly accents all over the place; meanwhile, most of the wordplay and cultural stuff in Bakemonogatari is untranslatable (...although a dub could be interesting for exactly that reason).

I definitely agree that some shows, especially ones that involve lots of Japan-specific cultural cues or Japan-specific cultural comedy, work better in Japanese.

I would never expect one of my favorite shows -- The iDOLM@STER -- to be dubbed.  If they did, it would have to be insanely good for me to like it, because the songwriting is nigh-impossible to dub, and if they didn't dub those, they'd have to find people with closely-matching voices, and if they did, they'd have to find people with closely-matching voices who can also sing.

I am pretty sure Azumanga Daioh is in that category too.  No one talks about cats' tongues in English like that.  It's possible to make a dub work with appropriately-translated material, but it would be hard, and the little I've heard of it doesn't do it right.

Plus, the more I recognise of it, the more amusing it is to pick out the bizarre grammatical constructions.

I wonder if some of the hate for dubs comes in small part from this.

As people who are not native Japanese speakers, and generally don't know much Japanese at all, I think that us anime watchers in the west have any bad aspects of Japanese voice-acting (i.e. the original Japanese "dub") masked to us because it all sounds like gibberish of which we only get a rough sense of voice tone and pitch for each line, while for English dubs we get tone, pitch, and all sorts of inflection and expressive information, which we get to critically evaluate.

1492 we fuk ur mathers 12 october best day of my life

http://www.cindyvallar.com/IncreaseMather.jpg

Well, I agree with that. The English cast is great. It's largely the dub's script that makes me prefer the sub.

And from what I've heard of the Azumanga Daioh dub, I agree with this statement too.  The acting is great.  The script is less so.  The problem I mentioned above, the "cat's tongue" problem, is a scripting problem.

And we should really differentiate between scripting quality and acting quality.  Both are needed for a great voice track, and I wonder if there's too little attention paid to the scripting.

Kraken

"When I watch something, I like to watch all of it; not just the bottom two inches of it."

There's something known as "peripheral vision."

As for me, I love subs. Subs for everything! Including for spoken English, the only language I understand! 

Octo

Actually, English with English subs is a great way to help one learn the language.

Fuschlatz

...Kraken, are you telling me that you don't even speak Chinese?

Kraken

Let's just say that I'm really bad at my mother tongue.

Formaldehyde

Chinese is really hard. I don't know much of it either.

And anime is for chumps.