Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - A Tale As Old As Time: Subs or Dubs?
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Glordit
 Posts: 685 |
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Some of the Japanese Dungeon Meshi fans love the English dub and think the characters voices are more fitting than the Japanese dub.
https://twitter.com/misteryurifag/status/1776689780585087304 |
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L'Imperatore
 Posts: 941 |
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Either in subs or dubs, there's one thing I absolutely abhor: shrill, screechy girl voices. They quickly get on my nerves.
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4660 |
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Habit is definitely a factor. The stuff available to me when I started was just what made it on TV, which meant that it was dubbed. Fortunately, that was also at a time where more care was put into them, so something that was genuinely a poor dub was getting less and less common. Even back then, the sub vs. dub thing got pretty exhausting since it seemed so rooted in the idea that older dubs were bad, so it was impossible for newer ones to ever be good.
The part about not noticing performance quality in a foreign language is something that an anime club member pointed out in college back then. It makes sense that if you're less distracted by processing the words themselves that it becomes easier to notice the performances. I did experiment a bit with watching subs back when simulcasts were becoming the norm, but it didn't stick, and I was content to wait for a later dub since that is what I was used to doing. Simuldubs effectively eliminated that. I'm aware that I'm missing out on some stuff because not everything that is good gets the dub treatment, but there is so much already that it's hard to get worked up about it. If anything, the wealth of content and accessibility in either format seems to have toned down the whole "debate." Then again, I embraced the idea of watching however you prefer a long time ago, so maybe I don't even see it anymore. |
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I Am Audrey, how are you
Posts: 42 |
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I’m an avid dub watcher due to my dyslexia, and I really hate this discourse, we all watch anime, why the hell does it matter what language we watch it in as long as we enjoy the show
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Thundercracker
 Posts: 54 |
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Why would I want an inferior experience with dubs?
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Gem-Bug
 Posts: 1330 |
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Depends on the sub; depends on the dub, really. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and both Fullmetal Alchemist series still have excellent dubs that I prefer to this day. But to some people, it's like living and dying by the sports team you worship, I guess.
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OpenYourEels4TheNextFeels
Posts: 141 |
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Issue I have with anime/tv/movie dubs that I never see anyone else mention: the audio mixing of the dialog with the rest of the audio is almost always slightly worse than the original. I think it's why I have an easier time with Video game dubs (and in fact generally prefer them).
Anecdotal example: compare the dub audio of Persona 5's in-engine cutscenes to it's hand-animated cutscenes, the quality of the audio mixing drops with the latter (to me at least). And an example to make it clear that it is not just an issue of recognizing the language affecting my perception: the audio mixing on the dialog in the Hindi dub of RRR sounds worse to me than the original Telugu audio, and I understand neither language (and furthermore, the original actors are dubbing over themselves for the Hinidi dub, so it is not even a case of me preferring a specific voice). All of is just my personal reasoning for generally preferring subbed anime though. Dubs should absolutely continue to exist, and no one should be shamed for preferring to watch dubs. |
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Zerreth
 Posts: 211 Location: E6 |
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Not a hard rule but the general opinion I've had is that: "if the characters in canon are not speaking an eastern, and more specifically a western language, the dubs will be good." This does not include isekai/narou-fiction where the author is pretending that the isekai world is speaking some fantasy language but still includes a massive swathes of japanese names and terms, which effectively make the spoken language Japanese anyway.
The bigger issue I have is generally that voice directors aren't really doing a great job with emphasis and pronunciation and you hear really stilted or strange proper nouns from the voice actors. It's just strange to me in many ways where if one were to make a living with a significant portion being from anime ADR, that they wouldn't take the time to understand the basics of japanese pronounciation because there's no doubt there's going to be a massive amount of future work involved pronouncing those kind of names. I know everyone can't be Yuri Lowenthal and work in Japan for a while but I would expect at least a bit of effort to try and aim for emphasis on the odd-number syllables. Conversely, JP voice actors who play characters supposedly native to certain worlds struggling with said language is equally ear grating to me. edit:
I can attest to this. Something went really weird with the hindi audio mixing. This was immediately noticeable when I was interrupted for something and had to pause long enough that when I had to restart, all the settings were reset and continued in hindi (when I had been watching in telugu) and the voices were not leveled correctly. In a similar vein, outside of lip sync issues, older kung-fu movies also had notably poor mixing outside of their native language which made a lot of the mandarin voice overs sound strange to me. Last edited by Zerreth on Tue Jun 04, 2024 11:20 am; edited 3 times in total |
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King Chicken
 Posts: 140 |
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I kind of miss when sub VS dub wasn't about politics. It was a simpler time when people would just say a version sucked because of the Japanese voices were too high pitched or the loli character sounded like a 30 year old woman in English and not cute enough. Now all the big arguments I see involve race, gender, or something else rather than nerds arguing about the quality of the voices.
Personally I always watch media in its original language since that's the way it was made. Especially if it's a piece where the Japanese actors are heavily involved in the marketing or merchandising like music or other avenues that almost never get dubbed. |
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Hiroki not Takuya
 Posts: 2687 |
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With dubs now in more than English, hearing (and loving) the German dub here makes me think we could start a war for a new era for those who are bi+lingual, what language dub is better??
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AverageAnimeFan
 Posts: 66 |
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You're not fluent in japanese? Why would you want an inferior experience with subs instead of being fluent in japanese? |
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Terraziel
Posts: 78 |
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I'm very much a subs-only fan, i watch a lot of old and obscure stuff and occasionally the only version around is a dub and i just can't bring myself to do it. Which is strange as for the most part i watched subs simply because that was the version available, I remember not being bothered by dubs back in the day but now dubbed anime just feels off.
It's worth noting that at this point i understand Japanese sufficiently that the nuance that is lost in translation for the subtitles bothers me as well. Though on the flip-side it does mean I'm more attuned to bad Japanese voice performances, which there definitely are. On the topic of titles, I tend to use which ever version I remember but i don't think Dungeon Meshi is a good example either way, seriously "Delicious in Dungeon" is just an abomination of a title and you can't make me say it, though that at least was clearly not named by a competent English speaker. |
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miscu
 Subscriber Posts: 7 |
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I generally bias towards subs since the voice actor pool over there is a bit larger and directors can pick a voice that blends into the role. Though for the anime I put on for my friends every week, I go with dubbed since not everyone is actively watching every show I put on, and the quality is generally very good on most of those to where I don't think dub-only viewers are getting stiffed on the experience. I've gotten the privilege of meeting a few dub VA's, and they're been incredibly friendly across the board.
Something that's been grating to see recently is any series/film with a big focus on music having the dialogue dubbed, but the songs are still in Japanese, creating a weird disconnect in the material. Like, I don't blame Sentai dubs of stuff like Kids on the Slope or Oshi no Ko for not having the budget to localize the songs, but then you have cases like One Piece Red where the Uta dub actress is literally a professional singer who did high-quality renditions of all the songs and yet the English dub keeps them in Japanese for whatever likely-licensing issues. And yeah, the closed captions issue is something I've banged the drum on quite a lot in recent years. In fact, it seems like Crunchyroll has started just putting in raw AI translated subs in many of their English dub versions, which is predictably leading to botched results. Embarrassing, especially in the case of shows on Funimation's service that already had the CC work done which never got rolled into CR during the merger. |
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Monster Man Enishi
 Posts: 21 |
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I'm strictly a subs guy, but far less fanatically than I once was. I first got into anime in the days of VHS, so all I had was access to dubs most of the time, and they were not the best quality. A friend of mine sprang for the subtitled VHS version of Akira, and it was eye-opening how much more we understood the plot and appreciated the lack of unnecessary grunts and noises from characters.
One annoyance I find is when we're not provided with standard subtitles and are forced into using closed captions, which 100% should be available, but should not be the only option. I don't need to know when "dramatic music" or unnecessary noises are happening. I especially hate it when it's off the dub script and it's taken more liberties than the original script. As far as fanaticisms, I no longer feel the need to raise a flag to subtitle righteousness, to argue with people over it. I just like what I like and other people can like what they like, no need to act superior, fight, stress out, and cause discourse, we all love anime, and we all have our preferred way of watching it. |
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faboo95
 Posts: 98 |
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That's pretty much how I see it, especially when it's something live action. I always hate watching a Chinese film dubbed in English, not because the quality of the dub is bad or that dialogue doesn't sync well, just something about the whole experience feels very "off". On a more "anime" experience, I remember watching an episode of Batman the Animated Series dubbed in Japanese while visiting Japan and also had that "off" feeling. Also for Ghost of Tsushima, prefer the English far more than the Japanese as the game was obviously designed with the English voices in mind. |
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