[1148] Shitstorm
└ posted on Thursday, 23 January 2020, by Novil
- Larisa: It’s become almost impossible to attract attention with good quality as an independent artist. Only a good ol’ shitstorm still guarantees clicks nowadays.
- Larisa: However, Twitter and Reddit are so overrun by total nutcases that you have to do something that really stands out! Politics, for example, just doesn’t cut it anymore!
- Larisa: It must be something that comes right out of the blue and reveals an uncomfortable truth! Something that really rustles the jimmies of your target group!
- Larisa: Something like this!
- Sign: Dubs > Subs – Get that into your filthy heads, otaku!
- Sandra: Do you want to get us killed?!
- Larisa: In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act!
- Sign: Also: “Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people. It’s produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans. And that’s why the industry is full of otaku!” – Hayao Miyazaki
Pfft! Like I would respect the opinion of a filthy casual like Larissa!
*Quietly fumes by himself*
I 100% agree dubs are better assuming they are good quality dubs..
I like to do other things like code when i watch anime… so i cant be reading subtitles all the freaking time…
and if i totally failed at learning German then i sure as hell wont learn Japanese any time soon..
Sure the japanese voice acting is usually very very good… but as time has gone on and people have gotten to know japanese culture more and japanese people in the industry have become more aware of the west i think they’ve gotten a lot better at both translating things and finding analogs for local accents or very old fashioned accidents and the like… so a dub can capture much more of the nuances then before… also since i dont understand japanese its not like i would pick up on any of that watching it subbed anyway… so all in all i think its very well done…
But half the time i think just listening to the light novel via text to speech on my kindle can be better then the anime :p
I like my anime in a convenient practical format i can enjoy while otherwise being productive
I prefer dubs, as long as they’re done well.
I think dubs vs subs also relates to the area where you live.
If I watch an American or show on TV in the Netherlands or Belgium, and there are a lot of those, it’s always subbed. I’m used to hearing things in the language they were made in and reading subtitles.
So I watch my anime subbed when I can as well.
But I can imagine that if you live in a country that either dubs everything like Germany, or in a country where there is no need for dubs because most of the movie/show content originates from it, like the US, you prefer to watch anime dubbed too.
@ Jay:
That assumes that it wasn’t poorly voiced in the original language.
Oftentimes with Japanese media the female voices are made overly high pitched, characters that we’re not meant to take seriously sound grating, and there’s too much emotion put into even a casual conversation.
Not from the original author -> probably not canon.
I “enjoy” most dubs, no matter the source language, about as much as Disney Star Wars.
A translation must try to represent the original as faithfully as possible, which is almost never possible when messing with speech. The only exception is when the dub has itself the creativity to produce a new work. But this is a NEW work! It still does not represent the original work!
Backward subs of course have the same issue. So Larisa’s sign misses the real debate:
Canon > Industry boilerplate
Vandroiy wrote:
This makes me recall the infamous “Warriors of the Wind”, a dubbed and heavily-edited (22 minutes were deleted) version of Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind back in in 1985. Long story short, it was horrendous.
From Wikipedia: Dissatisfied with “Warriors of the Wind”, Miyazaki became hesitant to release any of Studio Ghibli’s movies outside of Japan, and eventually adopted a strict “no-edits” clause for further foreign releases of the company’s films.
Arturo Fernandez wrote:
This is a bit catch 22, because one of the best ways to learn a language is to hear it a lot. There’s even research about it. Although, said research shows that the most effective way to learn is if the subs are in the *same language* as the voice.
So, even if you don’t understand Japanese, if you watch enough subs, then you will. And if you watch with Jap subs, you’ll get to the point of understanding it even faster. Using “I don’t know the original language” as an excuse to pick dubs is a way to shoot yourself in the foot in the long run.
Good dubs are better than even good subs, but bad subs are _way_ better than bad dubs.
the only case were dubs are better is the lantinoamerican spanish dub of dragon ball z. when you grow up with goku sounding like a man instead of a weird woman, then you can not watch it in japanese and enjoy it.
Why ‘almost impossible’? Because stuff like Gaia and SSSS exist.
Now a list of pros and cons of each type:
Dub pros: more appropriate voice tone for international characters, opportunity to improve upon original, quality control of being worth dubbing
Dub cons: easier to screw up crossing the language divide for nuance and wordplay, released later, if at all, censoring a thing that exists
Sub pros: more faithful to the original in voice and delivery, often released first and the only version for many shows and movies
Sub cons: having to break immersion to read text-heavy scenes, poor location of caption text, some basic knowledge of the original language structure required
If you know the original language at least little, then definitely subs. You will get better in that language.
Otherwise, good dub is better than good sub, but bad dub is MUCH worse than bad sub. In addition to that, dub is often damaged by shortening the dialogue so the voice actor is able to say it – especially if the languages are so different as English and Japanese. And there are fan subs but rarely fan dubs (and even more rarely GOOD fan dubs), and almost always fan translation is better than industry translation.
I remember watching one episode of Slayers with two different subtitles. One subtitle was in correct english. The other was in bad english … but IT MADE MORE SENSE. It was like the first translator knew english but not japanese, while the second one knew japanese but not english. In cases like that, you want the second one. Sure, extreme cases like “all your base are belong to us” can break immersion, but it’s still better that what translation which lost meaning can do.
Regarding the position, subs obviously must be UNDER the movie. Only that way they never go over something.
Note that I’m somewhat special case as most anime I watch is original voice with english subs … which neither is MY own language. And when I started watching anime I knew english less than now. In similar cases, english sub is preferable than english dub because I read english better than I understand spoken word, especially with some accents. Losing the original sound and STILL not understanding is combination really not making sense.
Subtitles are better, as the crew only have to translate the speech to the desired language. Dubs go wrong the moment they trim and alter the dialogue to match the lip movements of a character. While they need to do this to avoid Godzilla Film Translation, they effectively re-write the script, changing what is said and meant.
Subs are script purity, Dubs are lazyness.
Dubbing makes people more narrowminded. Countries who regularly dub movies over subbing are generally worse at English for example. I vastly prefer being exposed to the original media as intended over dubbing. Just passively watching anime over the years, I’ve actually found that I understand what they are saying even without the subs at some points – which means that it doesn’t just work for English but japanese as well.
You may have a civil discussion about it. You may have a very intelligent discussion about it. In the end, subs v. dubs is a subjective question because the truth changes from person to person. It’s the same kind of “debate” as firefox v. chrome, cod v. battlefied, pc v. console, etc. These kind of debates are pointless because they never provide a satisfying answer.
A little while ago my roommate found out that King of the Hill has a cult following in Japan, and many of its fans have debates about whether it is better to watch it subbed or dubbed.
Looking at it from the other side with a show I am familiar with in its native language, I have to say that you should only watch it dubbed.
Because having subtitles for Boomhower is CHEATING.
Foye wrote:
For trying to demonstrate “subjective”, these are some pretty terrible examples. That first one more than anything, since, you know, benchmarks exist. At best, these are examples of “it depends”, not of “its subjective”.
Obviously this youtuber saw this page and decided to address this question once and for all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8E79sraY-E
Their insistence on dubbing everything (horrendously, too) is one of the worst things the Germans have inflicted on the world in many a decade. The French, by the way, are just as bad. Dubbing forces you to submit to the (usually very poorly) translated version, subs allow you the freedom to go by the original or the (usually equally poor) translation.
Subs over dubs any day of the week. Also, bring back flogging for writing sloppy/incorrect subs!
Yes, I have rather strong feelings about this subject.
Jay wrote:
Having to read text isn’t immersion-breaking.
There are plenty of things that are, like Narrative Causality, loss of internal coherence and consistency for characters or setting elements, deliberately bad animation such as the grotesquely exaggerated facial expressions and changes in style mid-scene for “artistic reasons”, and so on.
But having to read text? Not really.
nekokami wrote:
I think we’ve all seen that one dub that scarred our opinion of dubs forever, though.
The top 10%, the high-end professional dubs, aren’t that bad usually. And very rarely, such as with Cowboy Bebop, they’re better. (Faye sounds like the cynical adult woman she’s supposed to be, for starters.)
But there are those shows I can’t imagine being in any voices other than the original actors, even if I don’t speak the language. If you’ve ever seen the Montalbano series from Italy, shown on MHz Network in the US (live action mystery), I can’t imagine Montalbano with some rando English voice actor instead of Luca Zingaretti’s voice — even though I barely speak a word of Italian.
Subjective = objective but only for me!!!!1111
I prefer both at the same time. Dubs are good enough now that you don’t have cringe-tastic voice actors or flat-wrong translations very much. But for me even the stuff that was made in America sometimes I just need the text so I can make out the dialogue in between the explosions. Or understand what the hell the stupid guy says with his thick, fake accent.
Not to mention when the writers had some bright idea to do what they did with Bane in Dark Knight rising.
The most surreal sub/dub experience I’ve had was trying to watch a Chinese movie in a theater. It was the premiere and some how they managed to load the dubbed sound track and subtitles at the same time.
What made it surreal was that the subtitles and the sound track didn’t match. They were both correctly synced to the movie, but the story they told was totally different. One of them was about the Opium war while the other had the movie being about some other conflict. Peoples names didn’t match. The names of the organisations and countries (apart from China) didn’t match. There was a love story involved, but with names differing and very different conversations in the sub and the dub it was total confusion.
I’m a compulsive reader. If there is a text I have to read it, so just ignoring the subs wasn’t an option. Something like 15 or 20 minutes in I couldn’t stand it any more and had to leave the cinema. It’s the only time I’ve done that, otherwise I’ve stayed and watched even the most ridiculous train wrecks of movies, but not this time. I remember almost walking out on Blair Witch. I was sitting in the front row and the hand held camera made me feel motion sick through out the movie. But even that I could take even though I didn’t really think it was that good. But that mismatch of the dub and the subs was just to much for me.
@ Jay:
Someone, who is capable a truly objective analysis. It’s a rare sight (at least where i live). Respect to you, my friend!