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ANNCast vs. That Anime Show

So Tatem really liked working on Steins;Gate, huh? That level of enthusiasm makes me excited to hear more of that dub!

It's funny how Zac pretty much gets them to talk about Anime more than they do on their own show

"If the Japanese line is to make the audience laugh then the English line should be, accuracy be damned" is way too dismissive. If you're not going to be able to do an accurate translation of a show because it doesn't translate well, then you shouldn't have licensed the show to begin with. Otherwise what you're doing is basically overwriting the show itself with something you've made up on your own, and it stops being the show you licensed and starts being a new show altogether.

The whole "well some lines don't translate well/don't sound natural in English", I'm willing to give it some leeway (especially in comedies, since they're such different beasts), but if you're just making up entire scenes worth of dialogue, then you're not doing a dub for that show, you're making a new show out of the intended show. It loses its identity. In which case, repackage it as another show and sell the real one on the side.

Name these dubs that are too accurate and thus sound strange. Most of the best English dubs are 90% accurate to the original Japanese version. Your Cowboy Bebops, your Spirited Aways, your Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complexes, your Baccanos. If you find too much difficulty translating the Japanese script into an English script that works, you need to hand the project over to somebody more competent.

You know, even though comedies are difficult, it's possible to do a mostly accurate comedy dub. Look at the ADV dubs for comedies like Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi and Excel Saga. Sure, they had to water down some thing, and in the case of the latter, use different terminology where it didn't translate at all, but for the most part were pretty faithful.

An English dub should ideally be as much of an English version of the Japanese show as possible. It's the representative of the Japanese show in English. It's the ambassador. If the ambassador misrepresents the show, it's not a very good one.

If a studio's desire is to make completely different shows out of existing ones, they should instead open up their own animation studio and make their own cartoons. Don't take a dump on existing ones because you feel the need to be "creative". I'm not looking for "creative" English dubs. Creativity should start and stop with trying to get the translated dialogue fit the mouth flaps right. You want to be creative? Write your own show. The Japanese already wrote these. Just translate and be happy you can take part in it.

So no bad Sarah Palin or Britney Spears jokes?

A little note here or there to explain anything they think needs to be explained, and that's that.

TitanXL wrote:

A little note here or there to explain anything they think needs to be explained, and that's that.

Personally, I find that distracting since I'm not going to prioritize pausing the video to get the reference as much as watching the show for the story.

Currency is always a tricky translation issue, but when doing a translation for a worldwide audience the best choice is just to leave it in the original currency.

The alternative translation without a note would be
to use "old man Benjamin Franklin", but that's an americanization.