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Do mispronunciations in dubs bother you?

For me, the chief problem with U.S. dubs is that the American style of VA work is, for lack of a better word, "hammy". To my ears, American dubs sound horribly over-acted. I know it's merely a different theatrical tradition, but it just grates on my ears.

Older german dubs made the mistake to pronounce almost every vowel, which isnt a big deal if you don't know better but at least most new dub are made quiet well. Therefore I even prefer watching those since i don't have to read that much :p

For me, the chief problem with U.S. dubs is that the American style of VA work is, for lack of a better word, "hammy". To my ears, American dubs sound horribly over-acted. I know it's merely a different theatrical tradition, but it just grates on my ears.

The only German dub I've seen was Pretty Cure, and it seemed fairly competent, in terms of translation and pronunciation of names. However... I've listened to a lot of German dubs of live-action films and series, and if there is one thing that has always struck me, it is that the production values on sound quality are consistently low for all German dubs, of whatever nature. I have no idea why this is so, but it is. For as long as I can remember, German dubs have been tinny-sounding, with the foleyed background sounds being miserable-to-nonexistent.

I've always wondered why Germans put up with that. Even to a child, the quality gap is obvious, and this is something that goes on in adult-audience dubs, too.

I remember watching a dubbed version of a Western starring John Wayne, and the Duke telling people "Hände hoch!" in a tinny, echoing voice that sounded like somebody with his head in a bucket.

Possibly, the reason is to be found in the fact that, unlike Danish TV (which has always shown foreign-language films and series subtitled), German TV has had dubs as standard. Maybe the sheer volume of material needing dubbing has kept the quality low?

- abunai

But I don't think thats the case anymore. Im watching Samurai Champloo atm and its very well dubbed i.e. the german voice of Johnny Depp speaking the role of Mugen. Theres a huge number of excellent german voices nower days. The most "popular" issue is the lack of effort some studios are willing to spend, thats unfortunately true. Backgroundsounds, laughter, groaning etc often are just adopted from the original version or even worse from the french, which is uses to translate into german-tv-format quite often.

After all i think its also a question of being unfamiliar to a language, even if youre able to speak it, it probably will always sound kind of strange to you since it isnt your native one.

Of course, I don't know a lot about voice acting and background music/sounds. In fact, most of the time, I barely pay attention to them.
{...}
However, I can't say that I recognize (or perceive) a quality gap in terms of VAs and background music - and I can't say any of my friends do. Probably it's because I'm (Or: We are) simply used to it. It's like with bad translations - if you don't know anything else, you just can't know any better.

abunai wrote:

For me, the chief problem with U.S. dubs is that the American style of VA work is, for lack of a better word, "hammy". To my ears, American dubs sound horribly over-acted. I know it's merely a different theatrical tradition, but it just grates on my ears.

That's somewhat interesting to me, because one of the main issues I still have with Japanese acting in many cases is that I feel like it's perpetually over-the-top...

To be honest, what amuses and/or irks me much more is the widespread use of Engrish in Japanese dubs, especially since, as a few other people have noted, there seems to be a big double-standard going on in the fandom where Japanese actors are excused yet English actors are railed on.

Perhaps I didn't make myself clear, so let me put it a different way. My problem with German dubs is not with the VA work, which is fine for a dub, but with the quality of the sound production. Also, when I speak of "foleyed background sounds", I wasn't referring to the music in any way. "Foleying" is the technique of recording believable background noises to match what the viewer sees, even if those noises weren't there in the original recording (either because the theatrical style demands an exaggerated version of reality, as is usually the case with gunshots; or because the original ambient noise at the time of recording prevented effective background noise recording; or because it's an animation sequence without natural noise to begin with). A foley artist "creates" sound to match what is being shown on-screen.

It is this precise lack which is most evident in bad dubs in general (and in German dubs, I'm sorry to say) -- a lack of believable background ambient noise. The VAs' voices, recorded in a studio, is more or less all you hear, and the effect is very unconvincing.

- abunai

I'm in complete agreement, and I think sub purists take on the role of apologists for Japanese acting to insane levels.

Honestly, as many know one of my favorite series is Eureka Seven, and I honestly found the Japanese voice acting was way waaaaaay overacted in that series, especially as the series progressed. I don't think the American VA's underact as much as people claim, and I honestly question sometimes if people aren't basing all this off of the dubs they saw 5 to 10 years ago, as opposed to what's out there today.