The Shattered Star

Rather than completely derail another topic for this discussion, I thought it would be more appropriate to discuss said issue here. Please share your thoughts on the subject and why you like either side.

I tend to lean towards subs myself and would prefer to watch them subbed if I can help it. However, there are a couple of caveats. First, if my wife is watching with me, I tend to go the dubbed route if available as she has trouble with subtitles sometimes. Secondly, and this is a rarity, if I can't locate a given anime in subbed forum I will likely be forced to watch the dubbed form. I find that more often than not, the given story tends to be altered for American audiences when it gets dubbed. Robotech is a real good example of this. However, I do believe that there are a few dubs out there that are enjoyable. Though keep in mind these are dubs that I personally enjoyed.

Your thoughts?

My immediate response would be that dubs make my ears bleed. It's like trying to go back and play 8-bit games - it just kills me. Especially if I've heard the original voice track already. I can't stand the shoddy voice acting, and it never fails to be bad.

The only exceptions I've made to this are Cowboy Bebop and Trigun. Long before I discovered anime via internetz, I only had access to anime through adult swim on cartoon network. That was how I was introduced to them, and they're the only two I can easily watch dubbed to this day; though I've since watched subtitled original versions.

If I come across an anime I've never seen before, go to watch it, and find out that it's a dubbed version, I'll toss it out. Even if I can't find it otherwise. I don't know that I could even watch them dubbed for someone else's sake... I shudder to think of watching Princess Mononoke and hearing Billy Bob Thorton's voice coming from an old, short man.

I like subtitles for other reasons:

Context. A good subtitled show that features references anyone outside the Japanese culture wouldn't understand will supply it. Yes, a dubbed show could do the same, but who's going to pay attention when they're not reading anything in the first place?

Speed reading. Keeps me in practice. Yup, go figure. If I want to keep up with what's going on in the scene, I've got to be able to figure out what they're saying before/as they're saying it, and still see what's happening.

Oh yeah, and I don't like blood leaking out of my ears.

I prefer subtitled anything. Anime, movies, etc. The Professional en francais, Bebop in Japanese, I figure if they wanted it to be in english, they would have hired english voice actors

There is tone you miss if thye dub a roundtrack. Not to mention body language mismatch if its live action. Hell, if my video games have a japanese soundtrack, I'll opt for that over the english one mostly to prevent ear leakage (Soul Calibur for example).

Dubs are horrible for very scientific reasons.

Say you have a scene, and the scene is timed specifically to the original Japanese voice actor voicing it as intended by the writer, editor and director. There's a sentence, two, three (per scene), and they're all timed to the Japanese specific aesthetic, and when the voicing is done, the scene changes and then someone else speaks, ad infinitum until the show's credits rolls.

When you dub, you have to not only translate what is said, but also translate it in a way so that it would fit the scenes, and the scene timing from source. Meaning you have to either break sentences, or speak them at a specific pace in order to catch up to the scene, as the scene will change at a given time without regard to whether or not you've finished the translated sentence.

This is pretty much always a recipe for disaster.

Then we come to the money. Fact of the matter is, dubbing is simply a cost. There is nothing that actually brings benefit to the production through dubbing, nothing is "created" other than a copy that you can sell in the given territory. It is an incurred loss for a gain that can't be quantified. Most Anime released outside Japan doesn't sell all that well, meaning whatever profit you can make, you should maximize on. This is hard when the actual licensing fees and dubbing costs, not to mention distribution come into play, which means publishers have created an entire system that makes this process cost as little as possible. This for the most part means that whoever is doing the dubbing is in a booth, doing it alone. As acting is in large part about REacting, there's none of that most of the time, and the poor English underpaid voice actors are forced to figure it all out by themselves, in that small audio booth, alone with whatever help they can get from whoever it is that's directing them (never the original writer/director, which is what is really necessary).

When you put those factors together, you almost always end up with horseshit. There are exceptions, but even they will suffer from this on some level, making dubs IMMEDIATELY sub-par. We don't even have to go into the fact that culturally you will never be able to match what is said from Japanese into English (not that Japanese is some sacred language that can't be translated, it's just that all of the intended language-specific inflections are lost when translating, as Japanese is not a Proto-Indo-European language, but is of a completely different source - the same would happen from any other non-Proto-Indo-European language to a Proto-Indo-European (which is what English is), like Chinese, Korean, African, etc.).

The showcase that this is true is the Metal Gear Solid series.

Metal Gear Solid games that are timed and made for Japanese, just like Anime is. However, when it comes time to do the "dubbing", a massive amount of money is spent. First off, as a game being done in real-time, Konami goes through a really painfull process to RE-TIME the ENTIRE GAME, scene for scene, to match the English spoken. This is something you can't do with Anime, unless you get the Japanese animators to re-draw and re-time all of the scenes, making it an entirely different show. English in MGS is supervised by people who worked on the original game, as opposed to a publishing studio that has nothing to do with original development. Scenes are translated and re-translated over and over again to match the intended meanings, which means a lot of TIME is sunk into the whole process, and therefore a lot of money.

And even with all that, Metal Gear Solid isn't perfect. It is however in an acceptable range where it's no longer a matter of "tolerating it" but simply accepting it as its own work, which is what it is through that process.

Anime going through dubbing doesn't stand a chance. It is why with the current process of creating it, it sucks and why it will suck indefinitely until those key elements change.

Many people cite Cowboy Bebop as a tolerable dub. Why? Cowboy Bebop was dubbed in a bigger studio with all of the English actors present, and therefore capable of reacting to one another, resulting in more believable acting, as a larger amount of money was spent to bring it over to English speaking countries. Bandai Visual distributed in Japan, and Bandai Entertainment distributed outside, meaning it was all still kept "within the company", so you could have the communication with the original developing team, and they were capable of directing some of it.

The result is acceptable in the end. However, all it ends up being is one of the exceptions that prove the rule.

tl;dr Dubs are shit. Stay away.

Many people cite Cowboy Bebop as a tolerable dub. Why? Cowboy Bebop was dubbed in a bigger studio with all of the English actors present, and therefore capable of reacting to one another, resulting in more believable acting, as a larger amount of money was spent to bring it over to English speaking countries. Bandai Visual distributed in Japan, and Bandai Entertainment distributed outside, meaning it was all still kept "within the company", so you could have the communication with the original developing team, and they were capable of directing some of it.

And it's probably for that reason, why Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex stands above most when it comes to dubbing as well.

No argument there, it's just that... as Price said in Modern Warfare when you ran the training exercise.

"That's better Soap, but it's not hard to improve on garbage"

It's still a long ways off the ideal, which the original voicing provides.

Dubbing is consistently inferior, so when you place it against subs, it always loses.

Just wrote a wall of text to this,
just for my browser to randomly crash for no reason...

Guess I shoulda saved a draft, o well...

Thats what I get for screwin around with browser plugins hehe.


The skinny:

Sub - almost always (my preferred method)
Dub - rare occasion (it is occasionally useful)

ADV tend to do (well, historically anyway) good dub work.
Pretty much all of the shows I can stomach which are dubbed come from them.

One or two I actually prefer the English versions but those are all big budget releases where the original writers got involved in the translation team, in coordinating with the english VAs.