Phenomenon: Dubs and subs of the same anime usually have different lines.
Question: Why do they translate it twice? I mean, they can translate an anime once and for all, using that translation for both subs and dubs. I kind of wonder how the translation in sub and dub work is done.
In: 5
For dubs they try to match mouth movements.
With subs you can get a more accurate translation since you don’t have that limitation.
Dubs have to fit the time of the character speaking and their mouth movements. Subs have to be short enough to fit on screen and be legible in the time they can be shown. Every difference stems from this tradeoff.
You can also have different subtitles depending on how old the anime is. Language doesn’t always have a perfect word=word match and one person’s interpretation of a phrase may be different than another’s; this is especially true with idioms.
There is a difference between localization and translating, and animated TV series are the perfect example for this. You want a script that matches the mouth movement. Anime, interestingly enough, is often animated with the already recorded script in mind. You don’t have that benefit once you go into another language. Aside from idioms that can’t be directly translated, languages have different flows, different sentence structure and different ways to express the very same thing. When you localize, you do not only translate the language, but translate the piece of work to be understood in the cultural and linguistic context that you’re bringing it to.
If you went with verbatim anime translation you would
1. Get a lot of idioms that you simply can’t understand without explicitly knowing them.
2. have a script in the background that does not match the mouth movements, simply because that would be impossible with a direct translation. The whole experience would feel asynchronous, and for good reason.
Lot’s of different reasons.
Mouth movements aren’t really one of them anymore in modern anime dubs.
When making the dub, the mouth movements nowadays can be easily changed. Even fan dubs/parodys do it.
But, it still has to fit roughly into the timing of the shot.
When translating for dubbing, extra attention has to be paid to word timing/pacing; you can’t just cram a 50-syllable exact-translation into a clip where the original audio was only 10-syllables without it sounding extremely jarring to the listener.
When translating for subtitles, that is not nearly as big of a problem. Reading speed is usually faster than listening speed, so as long as you can squeeze all the words on screen and leave them there long enough to be read you’re fine.
Usually, this means that subtitles are cheaper/easier to create – not just because you have to hire voice actors, but also because your translators have to do more creative/generative work when a tricky bit of mismatched-syllable dialogue comes up.
Japanese is also a very complex and different language to zenglish, so when translating things you can’t always translate things very well because there’s many cultural themes and ideas that just don’t translate well.
Same with English to Japanese.
Japanese doesn’t really have swear words in the way English does. It’s a very foreign concept. With that in mind, how does one even begin to explain the word “fuck” to someone who doesn’t really have a base concept of it.
English doesn’t have the same social hierarchical rules woven into the language. So, how do you explain honorifics to someone who doesn’t already know about them? A lot of people would say its like titles here, but it really isn’t, they don’t function the same or even really serve the same purpose for the most part – especially to younger generations who haven’t grown up with those values.
This is why a lot of translators and localisers do something incredibly clever. They take those ideas and rather than translate the words, they translate that idea in a way that someone from another culture can understand. At the end of the day, we are all human, so we all feel and think in very similar ways. It’s just how to communicate that which can be the tricky bit!
Sub and dub localization is not a simultaneous process, hence discrepancies. And it’s not just for anime.
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