Re: Fansub Code of Ethics

On 05/26/2009 02:18 PM, sanjian wrote:

The Wanderer wrote:

On 05/26/2009 07:06 AM, Invid Fan wrote:

I prefer dubs nowadays for most anime because I want to enjoy the
acting more. It may be me, but even after all this time I only
know a handful of Japanese words and too much is lost when you
read the dialog. Things like sarcasm, or mimicking someone's
voice, are lost.

One problem is that a lot of this sort of nuance (much more than
most people are likely to realize at first blush) is lost in the
translation from the Japanese, regardless of how good the
translation job and the voice acting may be. Better voice acting
loses less of it, but some is inherently lost regardless.

I don't know a huge number of Japanese 'words' myself (though far
more than I once did), but frankly, following things like
honorifics and verb conjugations and syllable emphasis and so forth
makes a bigger difference in catching nuance than understanding the
actual words does.

There are also Japanese ways of expressing things that don't
transition well to English - a type of culutral indirectness that
neither the dubs, not the subtitles can convey. However, as I've
finally started to study Japanese, in earnest, I'm starting to pick
up on them.

Yes - that's one of the other parts of the same thing I was talking
about.

I first noticed this general sort of thing in a no-audio-involved
context, while retranslating Breath of Fire and comparing it against the
somewhat shoddy official translation; I noticed that there are at least
four or five distinct (mostly regional) "dialects" of speech in the
game, which vanish without a trace in the English translation, and which
I cannot see any clean way of trying to retain. Since then I've noticed
quite a few other, generally much more subtle, examples of the same type
of thing, in many other contexts.

I'm fairly sure that things like Chrono Cross's "-tcha!" and the more
recent Final Fantasy games' heavy-Scottish-burr "dwarf speech" are
attempts to retain that type of "accent" in translation, but IMO they
don't really work very well.

Granted, this means nothing to the casual viewer, but it's important
to me.

Likewise.

--
The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.
.

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