There are so many manga out there in Japanese. I was wondering, for those who watch the series or movies, do you prefer to watch it in the native language with English subtitles or in English. I used to watch them in English. I thought it was easier to understand. Then when I tried a few in Japanese, I found out so much literally got lost in the translation. Some things were sugar-coated, watered down in English. The storyline was the same yet the dialogue felt different.
Japanese manga
- Thread started by ZandraJoi
- Credits
- 47,422
I do watch things in english, only because its easier for me. I know things are lost in translation, but that's just nature of the beast.
The vast majority of what’s lost in translation will only be noticed in the sub version if you can understand the spoken Japanese dialog. If you don’t understand anything, reading the sub versus hearing it dubbed doesn’t really change much of anything.
Most of the older dubs were either watered down, or censored, so the dub vs sub was more drastic, but nowadays it’s mountains out of molehills. If you watch the dub with the subtitles enabled for the Japanese dialog that came out in the past 5ish years, you’re really not missing anything.
- Credits
- 47,422
Honestly, people demonize 4kids for doing that, but they were hardly the only ones doing it when they started. They just got the butt of the criticism because they were the last ones that were still doing it.watered down, censored or got the 4kids treatmeant
- Credits
- 47,422
4kids censored a rice ball, they deserve it, no matter how good their dubbing was.
What I’m saying is that they weren’t the only company doing it in the 90’s and early 2000’s. It was forced upon by the networks for the dubbing companies to do it at the time. So you can blame Fox and WB for that stuff. You’d be surprised at how scared shitless of Japanese culture people were in the 90’s. Growing up in he 90’s as a Japanese person, people would flip their shit when I mentioned sushi and rice balls, so it’s not like the networks did it out of spite.
The other dubbing companies from that time went out of business, and 4Kids continued on. It’s just that they were the last ones to still do it, and continued when the fansubs were blowing up online and Adult Swim was really popular, which is why people only remember 4Kids for doing that.
- Credits
- 47,422
Not following why people would flip out on sushi and rice balls?
They flipped out at it for just being different and foreign. Nowadays Americans have some exposure on Japanese/Asian food outside of Americanized Chinese food, but until fairly recently they didn't. So something that feels silly to freak out over now like eating seaweed was super controversial then. It was on par with some of the crazier stuff Andrew Zimmern ate on Bizarre Foods.
When you have the tv networks wanting to bring a literally foreign product to America, they wanted to sanitize controversial stuff, and food was one of them. People freaking out over Japanese people eating seaweed? Let's make it a jelly doughnut!
The reason why it feels ridiculous now is because we're looking at it through more modern eyes. Because stuff like sushi is popular, the concept of eating that along with seaweed is no longer controversial. If you look at it through the eyes of what was contemporary at the time, you'll see "OMG RAW FISH AND SEAWEED???? EW YUCK GROSS!!!"
It's like watching a film or TV show that was controversial in like the 1960's, but you're watching it now thinking "so.... what's the big deal?"
- Credits
- 47,422
ahh fair point, back then I was like between 1-10 so I wouldn't have noticed such things really.
I only noticed it because I was the one basically being discriminated against. It’s only been like 10 years ago when Americans started liking sushi and it felt like it came out of nowhere.
It also hasn’t been that long when the internet would constantly have these articles going “woah, look how zany and weird Japan is!”, and it’d be some weird obscure shit that’s passed off like that’s the norm. This stuff became common knowledge for westerners, but we’re ironically completely unknown to most Japanese people.
- Credits
- 47,422
kind of odd since America deals with Japan a lot after the war.
I think it was more we're pushing our stuff onto them, and not much of the other way around. Outside of some minor electronics, you don't really see much of Japanese stuff coming to America until the 80's when Nintendo and these massive electronics companies started blowing up. It was actually controversial because you didn't hear about Japan, and next thing you know you see Sony buying out Columbia pictures and bought out 1/4th of the music industry and then Nintendo tries to buy the Seattle Mariners. It's like, where the hell did this come from?"