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I’m watching Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle with the dub (funimation) and sub side by side looking for localization antics. It’s nothing surprising if you are familiar with funi, characters are all a little bit meaner, jokes are worse in the dub, etc. the big thing that jumped out is they really don’t like it when the original talks about her pretty white skin, the dub doesn’t even just change it to “fair” or something to avoid directly saying white skin is pretty, they change it to “smooth” or otherwise talk about the texture only. But this is also not even close to the first time I’ve seen this, “pretty white skin” is right up there with “now I can never be a bride!” as the top lines that don’t get translated into English by localizers anymore.
- Heavens Feel likes this.
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@SerfnUSA Not surprising, trannylators hate White people just like they hate heterosexuality and marriage.
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@SerfnUSA Haven't read it, but the series looked really cute. I wish there was a way to let nip authors know how the standards of localization have dropped so much. All these little concessions pile up and you get a work that has been dulled down to the safest, most bland version possible.
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@nozaki I’m reading Fairy Tail currently and barely more than a decade ago they were leaving the attack names in Japanese with a footnote for the English name, and there’s pages of tl notes every volume. Fundamentally different translation industry philosophy than today, where the goal is to try to trick the reader into thinking they are reading something that was originally written by an American.
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@berkberkman @SerfnUSA That's one of many reasons why I don't watch dubs. In the dub, cute and funny high school girls end up sounding like 45 year old chainsmoking wahmen
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@SerfnUSA Do some of the VAs in the dub sound much older than the characters being dubbed? I've noticed that just most characters that appear to be a loli seems to be dubbed by some hag to make her sound like an adult.
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@SerfnUSA Absolutely criminal. Do they generally not leave TL notes anymore or have they decreased?
Localization will always attract low quality work because the good translators go into business translation where the pay is amazing. A lot of these entertainment companies are contract pay only so only people with mental illness get involved.
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@berkberkman That comes with the territory. There do exist dubs that are serviceable or even good if the female characters are all older teens or women, but any younger than that, forget about it. American actresses can’t even pretend to be that kind of cute. It’s physically impossible, the sin miasma that accumulates from being performatively woke on Twitter accumulates on their vocal chords and prevents them from projecting pure and innocent timbres.
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@nozaki TL notes are pretty much only used now when a specific Japanese food, clothing, or other object is mentioned. Something like fairy tail that doesn’t take place in Japan would probably not have any TL notes today.
I don’t agree that the low quality of media translations is due to the low pay. It was a low pay job a decade ago too, but translations were better. I think the problem is that social media, particularly Twitter and discord, has shifted and continues to shift the culture of the industry in a negative direction. Basically, translators are technicians, their job is to methodically take Japanese words and render them in English. Since the two languages are very different, they have to sometimes make judgement calls, which one could misconstrue as a creative act, therefore every translator has this temptation to see themselves as an artist instead of someone who works systematically. Industry standards used to keep these inclinations in check, often in contrast with fan translations where you would see the creative urge running rampant with TLs that said “fuck” constantly or would make family guy references or whatever. It’s changed now that all the translators are on Twitter fanning each other’s balls about how great they are when they artistically translate, and the reaction from normal people against this fuels it further, especially because it fits into the wider culture war with trannies libtards and other psychotics on the creative translation side and normal people on the authentic translation side, so you get this cycle playing out in the heads of every translator and in their conversations on Twitter and their discord servers:
“I want to be creative with my translations” -> “the people I already hate are mad about this” -> “I want to be even more creative with my translations”
The industries then start to slowly shift to the new standard being pushed by the translators against the will of normal people because even if they may have some principles about authenticity, editors and other staff members are still libtards and usually women and consequently they really really don’t like pushing back against consensus. Gamergate caused a purge of right wing and normal people from the entire gaming industry, including translation departments, so it went to shit very very quickly, a similar thing happened with most anime translators, but manga seems to be transitioning more slowly, still definitively happening but rather than any big purges it’s the natural process of older editors and other company men retiring or leaving naturally only to be replaced by people who are always more dedicated ideologues who agree with their translators.
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@BlinkRape @SerfnUSA @berkberkman I have to disagree with you on this point as I've heard them achieve far more range. As far as I know, they haven't gone on twitter rampages against fans either.
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@heavensfeel @berkberkman @SerfnUSA Japanese female VA's are no better, it's just on the opposite end of the spectrum
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@JungersGhost @SerfnUSA I can give name one good dub at least: Ghost Stories :smug1:
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@SerfnUSA Is there a list of Serf-approved dubs?
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@ChristiJunior @JungersGhost @SerfnUSA Ghost Stories and Kung Pow Enter the Fist are EX tier dubs
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@SerfnUSA @berkberkman >kawaii 8yr old chan
>voiced by Donna from accounting raising her voice a quarter octave
No thx
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@berkberkman Yes it’s not that I think all but Japanese women are racially incapable of doing cute voices, it’s that the ones in the industry here can’t do it.
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@SerfnUSA There might be some potential with fandubs and some Vtubers (imagine Gura voicing a cute and funny character), although there's not much interest to begin with. Also, the dubbing VA pool is still overwhelmingly small, so there's a variety of characters dubbed that end up sounding mostly the same.
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