Subbed or Dubbed?

[Faisul]

I only watch anime very very rarely, so I don't have much to go on. However, I'll generally watch the subtitled versions since the VA for dubbed versions are, in my experience, not very good.

On the flip side, watching stuff like Legend of the Galactic Heroes on Youtube was nearly impossible because the subtitles were just so bad. Thankfully, I found out that another upload of the series was available with much better subs, and I've been watching that version since.

 

There's something very annoying with subtitled anime in general that I've noticed, as the majority of fansubbers seem to have a rabid devotion to rendering Japanese phraseology, in English, as awkwardly as humanly possible. You know these guys are familiar with English because grammatically there's nothing wrong with the text they write, and the spelling is correct, but everything else, like idioms, syntax, expressions, terms etc. are just off. No engrish, just weird, if you know what I mean.

 

Part of the job of translating from one language to another is to make sure that what is being said doesn't seem like it's from an alien, struggling to understand human expression. This is, of course, a lot of work to do correctly, because you need to be aware of what one idiomatic phrase in one culture means in another and so on, but in my experience, very few such expressions are impossible to translate. But more often than not, I'll see a scene with what's supposed to be witty banter between two boisterous comrades-in-arms, that reads like two slot machines attempting to communicate. Very grating.

This is not to say that I don't appreciate the effort fansubbers make to bring some of this stuff to western audiences. If the text is awkward because someone has been translating all this on their free time, for no pay, that's fine. You can't expect the world from someone doing this as a hobby. But then you have the people who excuse shoddy work by swearing up and down that the Japanese language is simply too perfect and divine to be sullied by a rendering in colloquial English, who are also the kind of people who feel like pasting entire paragraphs of editorial notes over the screen to describe, in tedious detail, aspects of Japanese culture that is only tangentially related to what's happening on-screen. I get it. They like Japan. Fine. But do note that even Japanese people find their obsession annoying and off-putting, not to mention insulting, with their neo-orientalist crap.

 

When I see this stuff, I switch over to a dubbed version, and if that's unbearable too, I'll just avoid watching the thing altogether.

So, I guess my preference is somewhere in the middle?????

[Snys93]

Well, if its done right I'd do dubbed. Gods knows of those annoying voices they put in there.