Forum - View topicAnswerman - Do Dubs Really Contain More Swearing?
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unready
 Posts: 401 Location: Illinois, USA |
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The laserdisk (yes, laserdisk) of Monty Python and the Holy Grail has an extra feature that has been preserved on the DVD (and presumably the Blu-Ray). Some scenes have the Japanese audio from the video release in Japan with English subtitles that are the English translation of the Japanese dub.
"Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries" was apparently translated into Japanese as "I can only imagine what kind of people your parents were." |
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Aphasial
Exempt from Grammar Rules
Posts: 122 Location: San Diego, CA |
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The contextualness is what makes it a basically endless debate. Japanese is already so hard to translate to English to begin with simply due to how non-specific it can be... Sometimes I think the swearing should be handled almost as the inverse of the infamous "annoyed grunt" of The Simpson's fame, which became universally performed as "D'oh!". If every subtitled version of "kuso" was subtitled as "[Mild expletive]" and the audience was left to decide what it might be, I don't think I'd be too upset. Ultimately, a translation comes down to "What would this character be saying right now in this context if they knew English?" When going from a similarly-structured language like Spanish or French, it's not hard. From Japanese? It requires a lot more critical thinking and speculation on the part of the translator. Frankly, the indirectness of Japanese-to-English translations is probably a big part of what's made anime popular. Anime provides generally stronger stories and heavier themes than US animation has historically done, but an "accurate" translation of the original dialog can make the characters seem like children, or like university professors extemporizing about philosophy, or hardened warriors, or rough Teamsters, or genius 10 year-olds, or dumb high school kids, all through syntax and tone in the translation. Perhaps the "maturity" of some translations caused anime to seem more amazing that it actually has seemed in Japan by a native speaker.... Cultural distance FTW? |
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Selipse
Posts: 216 |
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Yeah, no. Stop. As a non-native English speaker, you really notice there's plenty of reasons why the original language is always better. I can understand why you wouldn't think so if pretty much everything you want to watch is already in your native language, though. I'm not saying that what you said doesn't happen, but the same can be said for the opposite. How do you get the idea that "nah, it's probably not good, they don't even speak Japanese so they just don't notice" if you don't even speak the language yourself? Anyways, this discussion is not about whether English or Japanese dubs are better at all, so let's not continue. |
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rebii
Posts: 31 |
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The so-called swear words don't exist in Japanese, but rather in the fervid minds of translators who think in terms of junior high cool. Shimatta more closely translates as I made a mistake, but any expression of disgust is appropriate. The verbally challenged of the translators frequently fall back on fudge. (dubs rely on lip flaps so I give them a little more leeway).
I agree context does play a part, but does not forgive those who use vulgarity as a crutch. Don't bother to reply, I won't read it. |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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BBC UY started out as an attempt to dub for about five minutes, and then turned into a deliberate Funi-Sgt. Frog style contemptuous-kitsch "gag" dub, heavy on the "sex-comedy" angle and "Japan is weird" contempt. Nothing to see there. As for the "real" AnimEigo translation, it's fairly clean, although a few "WTH?" might surface rarely when trying to suggest Ataru's rude dialect or Ten-chan's wisecracking Osaka accent. Mild profanity usually floats up to the surface in most comedies when trying to suggest the over-delivery of either, it's when the privilege is abused that gets the most attention. |
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Clarste
Posts: 430 |
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Peppering the translations with unnecessary swearing can have its own problems, obviously, but I think arbitrarily keeping your dialog "clean" can be just as bad. To use an earlier example from this thread, if your grizzled warrior comes home to find his village on fire, he's not going to say "aw, shucks". Not hearing at least a "damn" or a "shit" would seem out of character and jarring. And ultimately the goal of translation is simply to make things seem as natural as possible to the audience.
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Paiprince
 Posts: 593 |
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It's a tightrope issue whether you want to sacrifice potential accuracy for tone, voice and characterization. The kind of person who would swear definitely plays a part as to how much you could get away with being a potty mouth, but past history has shown that dubbers try way, way too hard into it. In "serious" shows this fails, but one genre that actually "enhanced" itself by adding in gratuitous swearing is hentai. Porn and swearing go hand in hand like bread and butter. In hentai's case it only adds a lot of unintentional humor to the already ridiculous premise it already has.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLmsVBgZiak (Definitely NSFW) |
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alorian
 Posts: 22 |
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I don't mind some variation as long as it works within the frame of character and context-- but the first thing that came to mind reading this headline was when I watched some of Saiyuki's dub after having watched it in Japanese. Hakkai, who is generally the polite and mild mannered one, has a line basically like, "oh dear, I wonder where all this fog is coming from," but in the dub it was more like "what the hell is all this sh*t OMFG" and the entire dub was like that, regardless of the character talking. Because the dub for that show was trying really, really hard to be SUPAR EDGY. Instead everybody just sounded weird and bad and out of character. So I'm really glad that's happening less. (It was, as the article stated, a real product of the 90's.)
In the past it was also weird and hilarious when you had one fansubber who skewed potty-mouthed and another that went more PG in the course of the same series. The set of fansubs I watched when I first saw Yami no Matsuei gave me total whiplash because of that. |
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Nitsugalego
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^This. Prepare for the angry weebs, my man. They hate the truth. |
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Kruszer
 Posts: 7988 Location: Minnesota, USA |
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Black Lagoon's Japanese performance actually has the the English speaking characters like Revy and Dutch swearing in English too, though the writer obviously isn't as proficient at swearing in English as English speaking natives, since it sounds pretty awkward. The dub is definitely an improvement for that show. Plus the F word is definitely not the only swear word in Black Lagoon it would be interesting to see a counter like that for how many times some of the others are used too. 
Last edited by Kruszer on Thu Oct 20, 2016 2:14 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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EricJ2
Posts: 4016 |
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Think I saw that: The Black Knight, down to hopping on one leg and saying "I'm invincible!", and Arthur responding, "What are you going to do, bleed on me?" was edited down to Arthur only saying "Nan da to?" ("What??") Sort of an illustration that Japanese culture doesn't quite understand ironic sarcasm. |
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PurpleWarrior13
 Posts: 2027 |
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I thought it was hilarious when FUNimation realized they could finally use cuss words in Dragon Ball Z. It was around when they were redubbing the Namek saga in 2005. They stopped recycling the old Ocean dub script and just started doing their own thing, and had no problem using words like "damn," "bastard," and even "son of a bitch" every episode. They could get away with it because it was being shown later at night under a TV-PG rating. It's weird going through the entire series because only that one small batch of episodes has cussing. The rest of the series was dubbed earlier for a TV-Y7 rating, and had stuff like "darn it." Not even their dub for Kai had nearly that much cussing.
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JDude042
 Posts: 261 |
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It's been a long time, but I remember Piccolo getting beat up by Cell pretty bad. He got sent flying a bit, got up a bit, and says, "Darn it!" It was probably right before he charged up that massive attack and fired it at Cell right after his fight with 17 got interrupted. I think in my case, my language wouldn't be so G-rated if I was getting my ass handed to me by some humanoid insect looking monster. |
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Furosuto81
Posts: 1 |
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I can't speak to Panty & Stocking, but having watched the first two episodes of Shimoneta in English dub, they definitely don't appear to be censoring any of the language so far. Which is good, since the whole premise of the show is about dirty jokes, lewdness, and fighting censorship.
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Mr. sickVisionz
 Posts: 2173 |
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Some dubs go overboard imo and make everyone sound like a bunch of middle school kids streaming profanity. It feels forced. I curse a pretty decent amount in real life and watch TV shows and movies with a lot of cursing. Sometimes it feels natural and sometimes it feels super forced in bad way. Probably more about bad writing/acting than the actual profanity itself.
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