Dubbed anime. Why is it so hated?

[Syntax Man]

Its a combination of stigma from the 90s and 4kids actions and people not being able to appreciate cheesy dialogue in a language they understand. Oh and there are also a lot of people with their heads up their asses, sure some dubs are bad, most aren't.

 

[Quaidis]

What almost everyone else has already said.

Dubbed anime tends to have atrocious voice acting. Female voices, especially, can cause ear drums to bleed. A girly Japanese voice on a young teen is perfectly legitimate. If you take that same character and translate it to English, it isn't an English teen girl's voice. It's a high-pitched, squeely, LOUD chick over-emphasizing every other word and hitting a certain note in their voice that can grate on anyone's nerves.

Dubbed anime more recently has started moving away from this trend, but it's everywhere in anime from around 1995 (or around when anime for kids became mainstream where you live) to the later 2000s. I can still pick up a perfectly good anime today and have that one main character turn me off.



Animes have fan subbing because people grab the episodes straight from Japanese television and translate them immediately. A year or two faster than the anime can get licensed and moved to different locations of the world. Some groups that harbor fan-subbed anime will take down their files if one of their animes gets liscensed (like AnimeSuki) to avoid legal issues.

 

[Nouw]

Censorship, it doesn't feel like Anime anymore, it's usually poorly done and the English should stupid in them.

 

[Drakmeire]

go watch the dub of gantz. THAT is why people hate dubs. another reason may be that Japanese translates pretty badly into english so hearing actors spout directly translated lines can be a little cringe-worthy a good example would be funimation's dub of fullmetal alchemist, which is amazing but the words are often simplified to be more accurate to the original japanese. leading to everything sounding a little dumbed down or just awkward one case being the word "baka" is a fairly string insult in japan but it directly translates to "idiot" making it sound a little strange when Light screams "Matsuda! you idiot!" after being shot in the hand (where as in the sub he said some MUCH harsher words) this isn't always the case but often studios will only change a few words around to make the speech sound more natural but leave some fairly awkward lines intact. cue al yelling at edward during a fight in full metal alchemist "run, run you idiot! he's going to kill you" then after the fight "You idiot, why didn't you run? *arm breaks off* OHHH great, now my arms broken off because my brother is a BIG FAT IDIOT!", this just comes out sounding very odd and out of place in a scene like that, the biggest problem I have found though is puns, azumanga daioh was pretty bad at this because many gags in the show come from the mixing up of word pronunciations a perfect example of this was Tomo following Yomi around with a box of "Comphski" (I don't know how to spell it but bear with me) and purposely mispronounceing it's name to sound like the word "penis" in Japanese. the dub could not do this and just had tomo saying "look, comphski, look it comphski".
in the end some dubs are great but it really depends on what series. dispute my complaints fullmetal alchemist is my favorite dub because of how appropriate the characters voices are, the japanese version's voices are a little too high and sound too young at times. and the less said about the original dragonball voices, the better.
I tend to watch both and see which I like. if you need to be versed in the culture beforehand and think all the voices sound cooler in japanese, go sub, if you don't feel like reading and think the english voices are well done then go dub.

 

[Naheal]

Some dubs are shit. I'm looking at you, Sailor Moon. Not all are, however.

 

[y1fella]

to my face

Their could be difficulty with that. You see I live in Australia (not Austria) and chances are you live America. Or possibly europe. Whatever most likely overseas.

Come over to Israel we promise not to kidnap you.

2 things.
One: "we promise not to kidnap you" is not at all reassuring.
Two: are you willing to pay for the return air tickets?
Also your avatar is creepy.

 

[Sacman]

Most of them are crap but I still prefer to watch it in my own language anyway...<.<

 

[Dark Knifer]

Because dubbed often leads to censorship and the voice actors are a long way off the japanese equivilent. The few that do it well are worth watching though, like death note.

 

[Swifteye]

I always prefer dubbing because I don't know the japanese language and I don't like reading the dubs seeing as I do four other things while watching something. But I don't watch a lot of anime so maybe I'm missing the annoyance or maybe I don't like japanese stuff enough or maybe I find japanese voices just as annoying as american ones.

 

[NeutralDrow]

The questions in the title. Is it because of frequently poor vice acting and scripting.

Yes. There are sometimes preferences due to authenticity, admittedly, but...

... on a bit more rare of an occasion the translation itself will simplify the story and characters to a point of the story's complete ruination. Sometimes this is not the case. Usually it is.

I'm actually quite enjoying one of those non-cases, at the moment. Negima!? actually has a great dub once you get past the mispronounced names, mainly because they took the script and made it fantastic. I'd say it's a lot less literal than the subtitles, but...it's not so much that the subtitles are literal, it's that they're accurate and comprehensible, but the Japanese script itself is surprisingly boring.

Strangely, I have the same feeling about the manga. The Del Rey localization is fantastic (and their habit of including translator's notes is wonderful). There's more than one reason why I prefer the official English release to online scanlations...

And while I'm at it anyone care to explain why there are so many fans subbed animes on the internet?

Because most stuff isn't going to be released outside Japan. Or is going to be released much later than people want to wait.

Some dubs are shit. I'm looking at you, Sailor Moon. Not all are, however.

Aww...Sailor Moon's wasn't shit, really. At least, there's far worse out there, only one or two characters' voices made me want to claw at my ears, and the utter cheesiness of a lot of it was kinda charming.

...changing the attack names was a little more unforgivable, yes, but they eventually came around on that (and bless them for it; "Sparkling Wide Pressure" and "Shining Aqua Illusion" were far better than the alternatives).

...and his name is Endymion, goddammit.

 

[Zyxx]

Because they're mostly terrible, probability of censorship, etc. etc. Due to the sudden explosion in anime popularity over the past decade or so, we get a significantly higher volume of it: unfortunately, the ratio of good to bad dubs has remained fairly constant (1 : X, where X > 9000)

As for the frequency of fansubs, it's because people love their anime and love to share it, and fans can enjoy shows they might never otherwise get the chance to see.
(Of course, TRUE fans always support the creators when they can...)

Fansubbing is also a really good way to practice your Japanese.

 

[mr_rubino]

The questions in the title. Is it because of frequently poor vice acting and scripting.

Yes. There are sometimes preferences due to authenticity, admittedly, but...

... on a bit more rare of an occasion the translation itself will simplify the story and characters to a point of the story's complete ruination. Sometimes this is not the case. Usually it is.

I'm actually quite enjoying one of those non-cases, at the moment. Negima!? actually has a great dub once you get past the mispronounced names, mainly because they took the script and made it fantastic. I'd say it's a lot less literal than the subtitles, but...it's not so much that the subtitles are literal, it's that they're accurate and comprehensible, but the Japanese script itself is surprisingly boring.

Strangely, I have the same feeling about the manga. The Del Rey localization is fantastic (and their habit of including translator's notes is wonderful). There's more than one reason why I prefer the official English release to online scanlations...

And while I'm at it anyone care to explain why there are so many fans subbed animes on the internet?

Because most stuff isn't going to be released outside Japan. Or is going to be released much later than people want to wait.

Some dubs are shit. I'm looking at you, Sailor Moon. Not all are, however.

Aww...Sailor Moon's wasn't shit, really. At least, there's far worse out there, only one or two characters' voices made me want to claw at my ears, and the utter cheesiness of a lot of it was kinda charming.

...changing the attack names was a little more unforgivable, yes, but they eventually came around on that (and bless them for it; "Sparkling Wide Pressure" and "Shining Aqua Illusion" were far better than the alternatives).

...and his name is Endymion, goddammit.

No, he's... King of the Earth.
(Also: 1992. Also: Canada. Also: Serena and Queen Serenity were in Prom Night 3. Serenity told Serena to shut her ****ing mouth, *****. That last one has no bearing, but still, it was awesome.)

Fansubbing is also a really good way to practice your Japanese.

At the expense of your English. =P

 

[kouriichi]

It is mostly from the bad acting. But every now and then, things get lost in translation.

Insted of "We must reconstruct is lower region.", it becomes, "He needs an artificial anus!"

 

[Direwolf750]

poor voice acting, loss of original context, attempted joke translations, things that people decide to change for culture, political, or religious reasons. there are reasons innumerable.

 

[Amethyst Wind]

Bad voice acting is not the main reason for this, there are plenty of western-made films with western actors which have bad voice acting forgiven.

The main problem is the bad cultural translation.

Everyday concepts in one culture which are used (unthinkingly) as framing devices for their dialogue/scenes might be completely foreign and utterly indecipherable to the second culture, which means that the second culture's audience will not enjoy the dialogue/scenes simply because they are bewildered as to what is happening. Bad dubbing is a hasty and unsubtle attempt to hash the original work into a context that can be understood, usually be straight-up perversion of one culture until it resembles something relate-able for the dub audience.

The One piece pictures that somebody posted earlier are good examples of this: The japanese pic where the badguy is pointing a gun at a child is wildly foreign to an American audience outside of Groucho Marx-esque slapstick, so they altered the gun into something stupidly comical to give it more of that feel.

The second pic where the character gets his skin bleached is another way to try and avoid a translation faux pas, simply because most characters in One Piece are caricatured in design, and not much is thought about it, whereas it's a much bigger deal in America due to the segregation issues of the 60s/70s.


Dubbing is going to continue to be bad until studios decide to make a stand and say "Hey, these guys do something differently, it might seem strange to you but give it a chance...oh, and calm the fuck down, they aren't intentionally aggravating you."

 

[Kamehapa]

The biggest things most people have against dubs is that they have to lip sync with the original Japanese dialog leading to somewhat unusual translations at times. Other times it is because of the censorship that is done during the translation (Anyone remember Rock Lee's Loopy fist?). There could also be some arguement for the level of quality in the actual voice actors and the way they translate emotion.

Honestly, I have seen Amazing dubs, and I have seen TERRIBLE dubs. Unfortunetly the terrible one's are the one's you are more likely to remember.

 

[Atticus89]

Personally, I enjoy dubs. Some are a tad cringe-worthy, but then those are just fun to riff on it.

Most of the cringe-worthy stuff are the shows aimed directly at kids. Yeah, it's gonna be full of puns are stupid jokes but remember what the target audience is: 8-12 year olds, boys primarily. Some of us anime fans got into it thanks to those crappy puns, so we shouldn't be that harsh. Well, I think that way at least.

 

[zehydra]

Bad voice acting. I've yet to hear an anime dub that wasn't grating on my ears. (Note: this is why I don't watch anime)