Forum - View topicAdaptation Liberties
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booberry
 Posts: 8 Location: Florida |
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I'll start off by saying pardon my lack of anime knowledge as I've only been watching it for a few years now. At any rate, I saw "Gigantor" for the first time the other morning on T.V. Seeing anime in black and white was quite cool. Certainly close to where it all began. One of the things that caught my eye while researching "Gigantor" was it's adaptation from japanese to english. What I found strange was that Delphi, the american production company, changed the japanese NAMES of the characters. For example, Dr. Shikishima becomes Dr. Bob Brilliant, Chief Inspector Otsume becomes Ignatz J. Blooper. Now I've never seen that in todays anime, but it makes me wonder. When I watch anime ( all english dubs), I do get the sense that something gets lost in the translation, but I always assume they try to get as close to the literal translation as possible. Is that a wrong assumption?
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LydiaDianne
 Posts: 5634 Location: Southern California |
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You see name adaptations in older anime because, back in the day, the American producers thought we, the viewing audience, was too stupid and/or racist to accept Japanese names.
Not to start a 4kids flame war, but 4kids still does essentially the same thing. Most of the companies have stopped the name changes because they realize and understand that we accept the Japanese names. Although it does make you wonder how they decided on some of the names that they chose. I never have figured out how they got Lita out of Makoto from Sailor Moon. The others Minako, Rei & Ami, those made sense as Mina, Rae, Amy and Usagi worked as Serena who would turn into Serenity. But, LITA??? |
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booberry
Posts: 8 Location: Florida |
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I understand the socio-political reasons behind the name change thing, at least in the days of Gigantor. What I'm wondering is what kind of liberties do the production companies take with script, if any? |
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totalgeek
Posts: 307 Location: Raleigh, NC |
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I think that today (I can't speak for 20+ years ago) anime distributors try to come as close to the original as possible. The only main issue has been eluded to in reference to 4Kids. Though they aren't the only company that makes edits to anime, they certainly are the most obvious. The problem comes with series that were probably intended for "tweens" in Japan. Those series are a little too kiddy for teens or adults in America, but too "adult" for American kids. So, changes happen to essentially dumb the series down for American children. This, of course, angers the purists in the anime community who would like things to be as unedited as possible. |
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Zalis116
Moderator
 Posts: 6897 Location: Kazune City |
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Do you have access to DVDs, or do you only watch what's on TV? If you get ahold of some DVDs, try watching them in English audio with the subtitles on. That should give you an idea of the kinds of editing and changes that take place. Of course, even the subtitle scripts lose some in translation, but that's inevitable. Most changes fall into a few categories:
De-culturization: Removing extremely specific Japanese terms and replacing them with something more generic, like Obon Festival > Summer Festival, sometimes changing yen to dollars, and otherwise making things more accessible to non-Japanese audiences. Content Reversal: the word order in Japanese makes for some strange-sounding sentences in English, so the order of words or whole phrases is changed to flow better and to have more dramatic impact. On a related note, information in a sentence that is not spoken but is implicitly understood by Japanese speakers is added into the dub and sub script in order to make sense. Variety/Comedic value: Translations will use synonyms for a word repeated in Japanese or more idiomatic English to make things more interesting. Some dubs, like Desert Punk and Negima, will make more additions and changes for comedy, and Funimation has a reputation for doing this. Some dubs make it their purpose to "tweak" things, like ADV's Ghost Stories. |
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