Japanese gamers split on subtitles vs. dubs for Western games

I actually had to play the English dub of Lost Odyssey. The subtitles were so off they were distracting to my wife, who has a minor in Japanese. Meanings behind the spoken word was not what you were reading.

Somewhat relevant?

http://imgur.com/VRNd1.jpg

...ok I just wanted to post that.

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous that there are still games that don't even include the option to hear the original audio. Games have had large enough budgets over the last ten years that it really shouldn't be asking too much to consistently have discreet tracks for subtitling the original dialogue and captioning the dubbed tracks. Companies put so much work and money into their games and then muck up the details, millions of obsessed fans be damned.

@Naheem

That was hilarious.

@Naeem: I downloaded that and from now on will look for every available opportunity to bring it up. Thank you for making my day.

It doesn't help that Muramasa had a terrible translation to begin with.

Sega did it with Sonic Adventures.

Capcom did it with like all their games.

An average film has less than 2 hours of spoken content. And that would be a particularly dialogue heavy film.

An average RPG can easily have 10-20 hours of speech.

There is also space constraints.

@wormania, an average RPG has 10-20 hours of speech? I think that's the exception, not the rule, ain't it? ME2 and DAO might have that much, but Bioware stands alone when it comes to that kind of stuff.

That should be mandatory, if you ask me.
Sometimes the dub is so amazingly bad that it'd be better to not have it on at all. Other times, I don't really care and it's just a matter of what I'm used to, really.

That said, the production houses that dub all these games, movies and TV shows need to hold a friggin' casting call. You hear the same set of VA's over and over and over again.

A lot of PS3 games have the option to choose the language. 360 games on the other hand is limited to only one language due to DVD space: that's why in Canada (specifically Quebec) you see an English version and a separate French version for 360 games.

Agreed. With blu-ray, DLC, and the simple option of having multiple discs, it's not an excuse to take out original materials anymore. Give customers the choice.

And this shows that the japanese feel the same way about their dubs. Its much easier to ignore bad acting when you dont understand the language. I imagine most japanese voice acting is just as bad if not a lot worse than the voice acting here, their talent pool is smaller and their live acting is just horrible.

I've very rarely read bad subtitles. But we're constantly besieged with bad voice acting. Yeah there are times when the voice acting is great and you dont need them but on the other hand the subtitles can be inaccurate or just plain wrong (Don't change a character's name in text when you can clearly hear it being said in japanese, that's just stupid.) It dosent happen as often though so I'd rather risk a typo than have my ear bleed to to the fact that someone wants to rush a line so they can make an important golfing appointment.

Oh man. I remember watching that movie in theaters and loving it.

Then I saw it on TV recently and it was dubbed. TOTALLY different feel. Felt like a lousy kung fu flick and not the awesome adventure it really was.

That being said I actually would choose sub par english dubbing in games over the original language and subtitles...but only in my games. I guess it's less obvious and offensive when I hear a subbed game then movie.

Whoever over saw the dub for that movie must have seriously been going for comedy with it. I have a collection of 70's kung fu movies and the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon dub was seriously about on par with those.

I don't think there is such thing as a literal translation. Those who strive for that end up with "all your base are belong to us". Then, if you manage to re-arrange the Engrish, you are left with textbook definitions deprived of original context, inflection, emotion, etc...

Rewriting is the way to go. That's what makes the Ace Attorney games so great. So to be a good video game translator/localization guy, whatever, you need to be a crafty writer as well as translator. Sounds like a tough job.

some good points there. i mean make it as literal as possible and im talking about basic stuff we can all hear. for example if i hear "hazuki ryo" i would understand if you switched it around to "ryo hazuki" but id rather you didnt, because im watching this thing in japanese so i would have a little foreknowledge that in japan you say your family name first. that wasnt the best exmple i know but its stuff like that. in the yakuza demo i find it irritating that people keep calling him kiryu but the translation says kazuma. i mean why not just have kiryu down instead? we all know its his last name. its not like we dont occasionally call people by their last name in the west

Translation is always difficult. Given a choice between a "wooden translation" (meaning, the translation is very literal, often word-for-word) or a periphrastic translation (meaning you move words around or change things to make better sense in the receptor language), I'll always go with periphrasis.

My field of expertise is Biblical languages, and I've seen firsthand the inherently flawed results of wooden translations--often times, these stiff translations have mislead entire religious movements into drawing theological conclusions that the text does not support.

For example, Jehovah's witnesses insist that we call God "Jehovah." The problem is that this word doesn't occur in the Bible (Hebrew doesn't even have a letter "v." God's name is actually YHWH. When the vowels were added to the language (it was originally all consonants, and the reader was supposed to know where the vowels went), the people who put the vowels in wanted to make sure that students didn't accidentally say God's name in vain, so they gave it the vowels of "adonai" (Lord), which is the standard circumlocution for God's name. That make the name "YeHoWaH." Germans, who were the earliest serious Bible scholars, translated the Bible very stiffly, and used this "word" as the name of God for arguments sake. But in German, "y" is pronounced "j" and "w" is pronounced "v." Hence, they came up with "Jahovah."

Now we have an entire religious tradition built around an insistence that we call God by His proper name, but they use a wooden translation built on a third party foreign language for the basis of this belief. The result is, they run around telling people calling God anything other than "Jehovah" is wrong, when in fact the word Jehovah doesn't mean anything.

***

All of that to say, I generally prefer dubs with subtitles as an option with anything foreign. Dubs are generally looser, which means they are in better English than subs (which I like). But sometimes subs catch subtleties that dubs miss (I have Neon Genesis Evangelion in both formats and I didn't really catch everything until I'd seen both a few times through).

I will say this though. On a project as big as FFXIII, you *know* SE is going to get a top-notch localization (decent voice actors, no "engrish," etc). So its probably safe to say that their dubs will be just fine.

@JCD
I really prefer this translation instead.
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=200

Nice, FFVII + wacko groups = double materia for fun!

No they dont. They only win if theyre appropriate. In MGS it makes no sense to have it be in japanese, youre an american soldier and the dubs are good, whats the point of having Snake speak in japanese? In Siren or other games about Japan then having the original japanese track adds to the atmosphere (plus the dub in the original Siren was hideous).

You're using a false dilemma fallacy, Eh. Most gamers do not want one or the other, we want them both. And don't tell me "dvds aren't big enough blah blah blah," audio compression codecs are sophisticated enough that you can squeeze a crap-ton of audio into a very small space.

Now if you're one of those people who insists he can hear the difference between compressed and uncompressed audio (you can't), then there isn't much more I can say on the subject; your mind has already been made up that there can be only one solution: BLU-RAY!!11!!1!one!11! Otherwise, we want it both ways so we can choose which translation is better in a given title.

Your Mom is a classy lady!

Ok, that doesn't make any sense to me either. I deserved that.

English? Surely you jest.

我個人歡迎了中國對領主.

Or maybe it'd be...
Por mi parte, bienvenidos a México sobre los señores?

"Por mi parte, bienvenidos a México sobre los señores?"

My mother tongue is spanish, but I don't understand what you said here ;)

Don't blame me, blame Google! I only know a little bit of French and Japanese, personally (and that's being charitable!)

Yeah, the only thing that ruins emotion more than that is reading it.

There are always exceptions, though, in both directions. Using anime as an example: there are old-school dubs that are surprisingly good (Ranma and Evangelion come to mind) and recent ones that are shockingly poor (Buso Renkin, for example). In all honesty, though, video games do tend to have more of the latter examples than the former. By and large, though, I think the field of professional voice acting is finally maturing in the West thanks to the advent of video games, CG, and anime distributors who actually care about quality localizations (c.f. Funimation). By and large, the average quality of voice acting in games, anime, etc. has definitely gone up, and I think dubs and American voice acting deserve to be supported so that this trend can continue and more talented actors will enter the field. But of course, the user deserves to have a choice. I just think people should give things a chance in their own language first, especially if a lot of time and effort went into localization (which it should).