soc_puppet | Frivolous Post

Frivolous Post

I'm about half way through the Avatar post I mentioned in "Things I'm going to talk about", and stuff has (of course) kept happening, so I figured I'd do a frivolous post.

1) I'm cleaning my room! Considering there are boxes unpacked from when I moved in a year and a half ago, this is definitely going to be some project. (It's also taking away from my typing and writing time, sigh.)

2) Speaking of typing and writing! Not only am I unstuck on my NaNo (which is now more of a Solo Novel Writing Time-period - SoNoWriTi?), but I'm working on Communications again! I am sure exactly five of you at my LJ/DW care about this fic at this point ^^a Still, you five can rest assured - an update is coming! Hopefully by next Lurker Day. Hopefully. (Mmmmm, long deadline.)

3) Dear Economy,

Please get better really soon. These going-out-of-business sales are really hard on my wallet!

Oh, and all that other, non-selfish stuff related to economy health, too.

Yours,
Me

I just dropped about sixty bucks each at two different stores, half on manga (local Waldenbooks), half on anime and video games (local For Your Entertainment). Granted, I got nice stuff out of it, but still.

4) It's bald eagle season again! It's currently proving that last year's uncannily high number of eagles was probably less of a fluke, and more of the start of a pattern. As my roommate C put it, "Yay, successful reintroduction programs!"

5) Something that's occurred to me recently: I know there's a lot of fannish love and preference for subs over dubs, for various reasons on a scale of legitimacy, but there is some ablism tied in there. Subs are pretty much useless to a real portion of our population: people with dyslexia, and people with severe vision impairment come to mind, though I'm sure there's plenty of others.

It's all well and good for those of us who don't have trouble reading subtitles to tell them to "just learn Japanese, then!", but if it were that easy, 99% of us would have done it by now. After all, if you can watch anime raw, why wait until the fansubs come out? Dubs are important to the anime and manga fandoms, because they allow accessibility that subs do not - and not just to 'n00b' fans (disproportionate n00b-hate being another troubling fannish tendency).

Anyway, something to think about.

Edit: Edit for clarity! I don't mean to say that subs are bad. There are lots of good reasons to have them, and that includes ability-related reasons (hearing impairment, for example). But there are people in the world who bash dubs and would prefer subs-only, to whom it hasn't occurred to think of everyone. They're actually a fairly large and loud subsection of the anime fan community, to the point where sometimes the anime companies listen to them. There are also people the other way around, but I am of the impression that they are a smaller/less vocal group.

Case in point: Last night, I purchased a complete set of the anime Simoun. (FTR, I am aware that it has trans* exploitation issues, and will be watching it with that in mind.) When idly checking out the back, I noticed that it only had one audio option: Japanese, with or without English subtitles. This is really fantastic for people who love subs, or people who rely on them to understand what's going on. It's probably pretty okay for the company as well, since they'll have saved money by not hiring voice actors or dub adapters. But it's not great for everyone.

I have friends who can't read things unless their faces are just a few centimeters from the words. I was thinking of them as I originally typed this entry, though I realize now that I should have been thinking more broadly. For them, if an anime is licensed and there is no dub track, watching becomes much more ...involved. It's an effort that not everyone will want to spend the needed spoons on. I'm also fairly certain that it's easier to find bootleg subs of anime that is legitimately available dub-only than it is to find things the other way around; fan-dubs are not, to the best of my knowledge, common, particularly of the non-parody variety.

In my ideal world, every DVD would have both fantastic subtitles and an amazingly well adapted dub track, with an aside that had notes on the culture and concepts that don't translate directly into English or "Western" culture. Then again, in my ideal world, half a season of an anime wouldn't cost fifty dollars, so I guess I know which one we live in.

If there's anything else I'm overlooking in my privilege, or being less than clear about, please feel free to speak up and let me know; in return, I'll do my best to keep from eating my feet, and clarify whenever I can.

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I'd say that it's not so much the preference for subs so much as the attitude that everyone must share that preference. Both subs and dubs can be issues of accessibility, and having that option is awesome.

This exactly! I love how, with DVDs, you can generally choose which one you prefer. Of course, if the company that licensed it decided not to do one or the other, you may be out of luck (particularly if it's the dub that's missing).

Yessssss. IN MY IDEAL WORLD, both are readily available, and I'm really glad that the overall quality has gone up so dramatically in so many ways from when I first started watching anime. ♥

Well, dubs are worthless for deaf people. So saying subs are bad could be ablist as well. (I know that I have a much harder time watching a dub, in which I need to monitor more words because there aren't words and the lips don't synch up (which makes it harder on hard-of-hearing people) so subs are much, much easier for me.) Honestly, it's very difficult to have something for everybody, unless you do multiple versions. Which they do, so cool.

Honestly, I dislike dubs because they tend to either delete out cultural items (uh, if I was phobic about the Japanese would I be watching a Japanese show?) or dumb down concepts and dialogue. In worst case scenarios, they completely change characters and plot points. (I'm looking at you, Spirited Away.) I honestly find the tendency to dub over all foreign voices to be a little xenophobic at times, tbh. Like we can't like something unless it's been changed to suit OUR culture. :/

I was unclear there, it appears; please allow me to try again.

I'm not trying to bash subs*. And I definitely understand the reason for subs, and the fannish preference; I generally share it. However, one of the anime titles I picked up yesterday only has Japanese + Subtitles, with no dub track, and I've heard people trash-talk dubs, and I just got to thinking.

I personally am in favor of better/more accurate dubs and adaptations, especially culturally. I'd actually like to get into the adaptation scene, since it's been suggested that that's among the better ways to change dub quality.

* Argh argh typed the wrong one the first time >_

Edited 2010-01-14 17:37 (UTC)

It's also very common, especially with the advent of anime on tv, to have dubs without subs--or even closed captioning. I think it mostly has to do with money, tbh, not just fannish preference. If they think they can get away without subtitles (audiences on TV don't want subtitles, or so they believe) they won't use them. If they think they can get away without dubbing (anime purists, the ones buying DVDS, typically watch them subbed) they won't include them. So there you are.

What exactly do you mean by adaptation?

I was unaware that lack of closed captioning was an issue. In my privilege, I just assumed that some mechanism in captioning-enabled machines caused captioning to happen. Clearly this is not the case, and I have just made a meal of my feet, and most likely hurt people besides. I apologize for the hurt my bumbling has caused, and will try to think things through more thoroughly in the future.

I definitely think money is a factor, and I know of DVDs that do have only Japanese + Subtitles - though I know of fewer that are dub-only. Having DVDs with both options would be my preference, especially since DVDs, unlike VHS, have that option.

I mean taking the more exact translation that the translators provide, and re-wording things to sound more natural in English, or to better match mouth movement; good adaptations do this while -at the same time- staying as close to the original meaning as possible. It's far from a perfect system, and there can be clogs along the way (directors wanting voice actors to pronounce a name in a way that sounds more "natural" to native English speakers, for example), but in a panel with some fairly big name dub voice actors, they said it was probably the best way to make dubs as a whole better.

:/ That terrible Glee episode with the deaf people (which was pretty annoying anyway) wasn't closed captioned in my area. It's usually a service paid for by the networks that put shows on, or the producers of the show. (Which is why you often hear 'closed captioning is provided by blah blah blah sponsor which is usually Subaru' lol.) It's not even that expensive, but a lot of times people don't bother. Or they don't bother to get good captioning. Captioning is better than it used to be, but it still gets garbled and scrambled pretty damn often. You get used to guesstimating.

Typically, that's the way it is. Depends on the size and laziness of the company, though.

At the same time, though, something as simple as the choosing of a voice actor can completely change the artistic vision of the first show. Going with my last example, Spirited Away, while translated very well (Disney tends to be good at that) used an adult actor for Haku that acted him as a very strong, responsible, self-assured character. This made the whole 'saving Haku' storyline kind of unbelievable. Watching it later in Japanese with Irino Miyu makes you go OHHHH dude, he's like a little boy! I didn't realize that! The point is, you have to capture the feel of the original, not just the translation.

While translation is a part of it, overall dub quality and faithfulness to the source is still not where I'd hope it'd be. (American attitudes towards voice acting is a part of that...)

FOR A PIECE OF DUB TRIVIA, did you know that the movie Babe is dubbed? English to English. They just wanted to take out the Australian accents so American audiences would relate better. It was a fantastic dub, but so unnecessary. :(

Edit made to post, which I hope is now more inclusive/a better representation of what I mean (though I'm pretty sure the edit itself got better as it went, as I was typing it over the course of our exchange, and is still certainly far from perfect -_-a ).
___

I've seen that with captioning, actually. I don't usually have it on, but when I do, it does stick out when it's bad. I wasn't aware that it was so common, though. (I'm now picturing something of a bell curve *.*) It really sucks that closed captioning isn't, as a whole, better.

That's an excellent point about voice actor choices. The right (or wrong) voice can lend huge aspects to characters that might otherwise be hard to pick out. Again, not something that I imagine would be too important to a deaf person, but still.

Both translation and dub adaptation are not where I'd have them be, either. Maybe someday... (If you have the time/energy/inclination, I'd like to hear more about this? I know I have some biases that it would probably be good to at least recognize. If you're not interested, I'll probably try and research on my own.)

What, really? Huh. Come to think of it, that movie makes more sense to me with the setting being Australia. I'll have to check my copy of the DVD, see if it has the un-dubbed track. I doubt it, but one can hope, right?

Sticky captioning does lead to some hilarious mashups when you're going through channels, though. Sometimes a piece of captioning will get stuck on your screen and it is almost invariably something like 'AND THEN MY PENIS SAID--' and then you keep going and underneath pops up 'GIMME MASHED POTATOES' or whatever. I love those moments.

Nah, that's more something that annoys me than my sister. XD Honestly, the biggest thing with deaf people is scuzzy subs that don't differentiate between speakers and stuff. With English captions, they can kind of match up what people are saying and when they're saying it based on how the lips are shaped. Not all deaf people lip read, obviously, but most I've met can at least take cues from it. Almost all hard of hearing (but not profoundly deaf) people I know have a much, much easier time if they can see the face of the person talking. (Which is why words not matching up with lips is hard.)

Actually, one of the most annoying things is--well, you know TV on demand? A lot of shows (A LOT) on VOD aren't captioned. Even ones that are captioned while on normal tv aren't captioned on demand. Annoying!

Also, what exactly are you interested in?

IMDB tells me everything! I also learned that the man who played the farmer went vegan after making that movie. :(

At my parents' house, our old TV automatically captioned any time we put "mute" on. (Naturally, not all the commercials (typically the only thing we mute for; if it's anything else, we turn away from the TV entirely) were captioned, but I seem to have casually [callously] dismissed that, because who wants to know what people are saying in non-PSA commercials anyhow?) Occasionally, we'd get caption lag [while staying on one channel], but the funniest part was when the new captions tried to overtake the old, and we'd end up with horribly garbled words.

Yeah, I can see how that would be a problem >_O Suddenly, I have so much more love for the subs that differentiate speakers by font color (or similar).

I've never actually used/had TV on demand. That seriously sucks, though. I mean, if you have to pay for it, why the hell wouldn't you want all the possible viewing options? Makes piracy seem a lot more acceptable.

Well, I was aware (mostly through my own internalized prejudices, I admit) that anime fan culture tends to favor subs over dubs as an aspect of, hm. Exclusivity, perhaps? The implication is that only "n00bs" like dubs, because they don't know any better, and anyone who "should" know better but likes dubs anyway usually has a "good" excuse, and is therefore an exception. (Similar: Fatphobia. In general fatphobia, anyone who is fat is lazy and eats poorly, and anyone who both exercises and eats healthily and is still fat is some sort of anomaly. Thin people who don't exercise and who eat huge meals/junk food regularly are ignored in favor of maintaining the status quo.)

I also know that some US fans can become pretty avid fans of the US voice actors, usually as an extension of the characters they, uh, 'represent'; it also helps that most of the voice actors I've met have actually been pretty cool, though there are certainly some who aren't. Other than that, I'm not too aware of the culture surrounding voice actors/voice acting in general in the US. I guess anything you can tell me about US-centricism in voice acting? Or similar?

Ah, IMBD; you are full of helpful facts ¦Db

Am very lucky to have friends here that are huge anime geeks. And most of us prefer subs over dubs for various reasons, (speed, lack of edits, cultural information, accuracy, habit due to availability years ago when we got hooked, etc) but I have one friend who will occasionally leave the room when we're playing subs.

He can't read and watch the action at the same time. It gives him a migraine headache. So he can either read, and miss what's going on, or watch and have no clue what they're saying.

This is frustrating to him, so he doesn't do it. Or he'll sit in the back and ask for clarification once in a while.

So yeah. Completely get what you're saying. ^____^

Yowch >_O I feel for him.

I sometimes like to watch dubs so I can do something else at the same time - something that requires a bit more of my eyesight than just sitting on the couch - and dubs are good for that. There's also some dubs I feel nostalgia for, like the dub for Kiki's Delivery Service. It's much more important for people who need them, though.

I get what you mean - when my sister was younger, I used to read the subs to her so she could enjoy Slayers. It took me a while to get used to Subs (I found they increased my reading speed) and actually increased rewatability. If I was really confused, I'd wiki it then rewatch.

There are a few series - okay, two - where I actually prefer the dub track. Both are set in English based environments. I find watching things set in Japan in English particularly annoying; so many things do not translate well and in a culture setting, I find that is very important. Now, I actually do have a bit of an audio issues, so I often put subs on even for other things, particularly if we have a lot of ambient noise.

In general, it seems quality of subs > quality of dubs, which is why I prefer them. We were having a debate in club the one day, and we ran a scene where a character died twice, once in English and once in Japanese. The depth of delivery was far superior in Japanese in terms of range of emotion. Ideally they would be identical, but I don't know how much work they put into the dubbing process over here. I know sometimes in Japan they do multiple run throughs, especially in the beginning to 'establish a character'.

I might also have a burning hatred of a certain dub voice actor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_Mignogna) who goes and says things that he doesn't know are true, like claiming to know the results of Certain Movies before Said Movie was even released - and being Very Wrong.

*The exception being where subs are CC's of the Dub. That drives me CRAZY.

I learned a little bit about the dubbing process at a panel I went to at AI '08, hosted by some of our US voice actor guests. In general, I got the impression that dubbing follows roughly this process: the anime is selected; the anime is translated by translators, who go for literal meaning*; the translation is adapted by adapters, who go for close-as-possible meaning that will match the lip movement better in English**; somewhere in here, actors are selected for various parts (I'm not exactly sure where this step falls, and I wouldn't be surprised if it changed a lot); actors work with the dub director for the dub track (I'm not sure how many takes the average scene gets for a US release :/ ). Also somewhere along the line, the producers and some staffers in Japan may be contacted to clarify things (name spellings, for example; it is not unusual for a name that would have a more practical Romanization to be awkwardly done because that's how it's officially spelled by the Japanese company).

The voice actors also talked about adaptation. They said good script adaptation was probably the best/easiest way to improve dubs as a whole in the US. There are also many instances where the dub director will insist a character's name is pronounced differently than it is in the Japanese version; some dub actors have gone to bat for the original Japanese pronunciation, but they may or may not succeed on any given word/name.

Anyway, the whole panel gave me a new perspective on dubs and stuff.

* Exceptions: Things like Samurai Pizza Cats, where they just ignored/threw out the original script, and made shit up on the fly.
** Exceptions: Dubs with drastic changes to names, plot details, with lotsa censorship, etc.

I consider myself extremely lucky that I've only met "cool" US voice actors. AI tends to invite a high quality of personality as well, IMO. Our guests department heads get good input from the con execs, and tend to take complaints well. *is probably biased* Needless to say, we've not yet invited that particular voice actor, and I'm fairly certain we have no plans to do so ;)

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