I like subtitled anime in Japanese. I pretty much enjoy watching anything in its original language. I like seeing mouths and words coming out of said-mouths in sync. I realise that every language has its own little nuances that might give just that more meaning to a given line, and that some subjects simply don’t translate as cleanly as we might hope. I like how after time, by watching a lot of subtitled stuff, you start picking up bits and pieces of the language itself. Granted, you can’t become fluent in the language by just watching television, but it’s still good for grins when your new Japanese friend asks you about alcoholic content of vodka and you can proudly proclaim, “Yonju pasento da!”

That said… for the past couple years I’ve been watching a lot of my anime DVDs with the English tracks more and more.

“The voices are horrible and don’t match!” “They can’t pronounce the names right at all!” “They changed the name altogether!” “4Kids should die!” These are all very common complaints about dubbed anime these days. It can’t be denied, a lot of times the original Japanese language track just fits better than the English ones made after the fact. But you know, just because one thing fits better than another doesn’t mean that the other has to suck royal. I’m not saying that you have to like dubs or watch all your anime in English – far from it – I just want to give an idea of why we can all at least appreciate the dub. As is the whole point of localisation, it makes shows accessible for an entire country or DVD region – for the hardcore fans, the casual fans, and for the open-minded stepfathers of the aforementioned fans. Also, these English voice tracks aren’t exactly encoding themselves out of thin air, and it takes a lot of work to try to get these dubs out in as good of quality as they can and should. Finally, just as there are some meanings only Nihongo itself can truly get across, there are in fact some things English can do better. Given how often people blast them for poor dubs, I think these voice studios deserve at least a little slack from us before we choke the internet blogs and message boards with their bones.

Just a quick question to ask yourselves: what was the first anime you ever saw? Apart from the odd show or movie seen before we even knew what anime was, most people would answer along the lines of Sailor Moon, Dragonball Z, or maybe Pokemon for the younger ones. I’ll bet that most western audiences seeing their first anime watched it in their native language, televised on a “regular” television station, played during a very available time in the day. So what came after Sailor Moon and Dragonball Z? For me and most likely a lot of the young audience in Canada, it was Gundam Wing. In fact, I vividly remember the first day they ever aired an episode of Gundam Wing on YTV. Some kids wrote to the station criticizing the move, being that it was going to air during Dragonball Z's timeslot and they feared a replacement for the whole week (the irony never ceases to escape me all these years later). Others wrote in saying that Gundam Wing was in fact a great show and that it was great to finally get to see stuff like it on TV over here. So sure, we may look back to those shows now and nitpick all the faults inherent in localization and censoring (“Shinigami” really does just sound so much better than “Great Destroyer”), but the fact remains that those dubs were in fact what got many of us started on watching anime in the first place all those years back.

Going back to that whole “Great Destroyer” thing… yes, the edited Gundam Wing dub pulls its punches a lot in terms of word choice and on-screen violence and stuff. But now consider this: how badly censored was the English version of Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz? Translation flubs aside, the dub reinserted bloodletting and the word “kill”. This is bigger than you might think; all through the series people were never “killed” but instead were “stopped” or “destroyed”. Away from the stricter television censoring, the dubbing studio for Endless Waltz was able to say things like, “How many more times do I have to kill that girl and her puppy?” ('cause seriously, hearing that for the first time was downright awesome...). Dubbing studios have the means and desire to give a straight-forward translation given the opportunity. In the case of anime on DVD targeted at an older audience, it’s not uncommon to hear plenty of cursing in good form – it’s those other ones playing on TV after school that are slightly trickier. Translating a completely different language with a completely different sentence structure is tricky enough. Translating a completely different language with a completely different sentence structure while adhering to specific television guideline conduct and keeping the words to a rhythm that can match the original dialogue’s lip flaps – all the while retaining elegant English? To get anything even remotely passable is amazing in itself – to produce something like that of decent quality, well… now that takes talent.

If most people had to pick out the aspect of dubbed anime people dislike the most, voice acting would probably top the list. They say that the voice doesn’t match the character, that it’s too whiney or too old, or that they just can’t do a convincing job. There are many, many factors towards what makes a good or bad dub job: among them are the voices (obviously), the written script, and the time and money needed to complete the job. It’s easy to blame the voice actor for not doing a good enough job, but it just isn’t that simple. At previous conventions I’ve gone to, I’ve spoken with a lot of Vancouver voice actors with a lot of experience in the field. They really gave us some insight into the whole process of recording a dub track. Unsurprisingly, I’ve seen a lot of claws against this pretty recognizable group, either complaining about the actors themselves (in example, I’ve read one webmaster’s view that Moneca Stori’s work as Kagome in Inuyasha was “extremely annoying... It comes across as too nasal...”).

Thing is, it isn’t as though Ocean Productions (where much voice work in Vancouver takes place) only does voice work for anime. I took a quick scan through user comments on imdb.com for X-Men: Evolution, for which Ocean also did the voice work and on which many Vancouver voice actors worked. Anyone who comments on the voice acting generally praises it, often remarking that it even exceeded the work done on the older ‘90s X-Men cartoon. The point is that these are talented voice actors with plenty of experience under their belts. Really, how can you not respect someone who has to correctly sigh into a microphone (on the imaginary fourth beat) with written direction like (as Cathy Weseluck once described) “CM tired exert reaction”? And let’s not even get into those nineteen second Dragonball yells… considering they have some of the most unforgiving critics in the world, they definitely deserve much more credit than we’re sometimes willing to give.

While we’re in the mood to give credit, here’s another thought: why is it we give the Japanese seiyu so much? Don’t get me wrong, I think they do a great job for the most part… but considering how often we criticize English voice actors for being unable to correctly pronounce Japanese, why are we less prone to complain about the “Engrish” in a lot of anime? We’ve all complained about the pronunciation of “Sakura” before, and yet we don’t care that in Japanese, “Christmas” is five syllables long: Ku-ri-su-ma-su. It’s fun and cute to us for some curious reason instead of jarring and painful. That’s just one word… now consider the full-on Engrish; take the original voice track for the anime Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad, for example...

Now, Beck lends itself to a lot of cross-language humour with two characters who supposedly grew up in New York, are more comfortable with English than Japanese, and can’t read Kanji for their lives. This, of course, is why the character Maho – in and around many, many noticeable “F-bombs” – says the lines, “I’m not whore like you think!” and “Scary? Who do you think I’m making me scary?!” Again, we can’t blame the voice actors for the scripts given to them... still, you really have to wonder if anime producers are doing this on purpose in an effort to be kitsch or something. I know for a fact that there are people out there fluent in both English and Japanese, capable of excellent pronunciation for both. They just… don’t happen to be doing Japanese voice work, it would seem – if only Rie Fu did voice work along with singing…

If there’s one saving grace to English-dubbed anime as a whole, it’s that it’s constantly getting better. Nowadays, some dubs even identify speakers of Kansai-ben either through different vocabulary or accents. Some dubs, like the ones for Azumanga Daioh and Naruto, are keeping more original Japanese that people might have changed years before. ADV stuck with “Chiyo-chan” and Osaka’s stuffed rendition of Honshu when another dub might have changed the puzzling plushie to a goose liver or perhaps an abstract concept like “expensiveness” or something else equally ridiculous; likewise, Cartoon Network kept the words “sensei” and “jutsu”, if little else. While on the subject of Naruto, I think recognition should go to the quadrilingual Yuri Lowenthal because, whether you like his Sasuke voice or not, the man definitely knows how to pronounce his Japanese names and terms. Even when dubs do change an aspect of a show, it’s often for better reasons than “this doesn’t translate well”. Case in point, Tiffany Grant’s portrayal of German-raised Asuka Langley Soryu actually uses a great deal more (correct) German speech than the Japanese seiyu in Neon Genesis Evangelion – and this doesn’t even include Gainax’s odd insistence on calling her the “Second Children”.

I’ve said it before in other writings that “different” doesn’t necessarily have to mean better or worse. In the end, the decision to watch anime in either language is still up to the viewer. Anime is indeed a Japanese medium, but without localisation efforts like language dubbing, this medium would have never gotten as widespread as it is today. There’s enough hate in the world as it is, and it really is not necessary to add voice work for a television show to the list – you don’t have to like it if you don’t want to, but you don’t need to hate it. Dubs are just another means to the same end. If not for anything else, they give double the mileage out of an already expensive anime DVD… and that’s never a bad thing…

…and then there’s the old One Piece, but I’m not even gonna go there…