Firstly, I’ve noticed in a lot of English dubbed anime, that there are a lot of nonverbal sounds such as: “hmmm?” “hmmm!” “ah?” “ah!” “ah-hmmm?” You get the idea. There are an endless variety of them. After awhile, it seems comical how excessively they occur. Is there a reason behind this? I know from watching samurai movies that the Japanese will sometimes use a short “mmm!” to signal agreement. Do they have a billion of these nonverbal expressions as well or is this unique to anime?
Secondly, in a lot of English dubbed anime, they will speak very rapid fire with almost no pauses between sentences. Their sentences often become one long, run on sentence. Is this just a matter of the sound editing?
Thirdly, the emotional inflections are often just way off. Sometimes they will speak in a flat monotone when they should be emotional and other times they will start yelling for no apparent reason. Is this just bad direction?
Mostly they are trying to mimic the japanese without knowing which words they ought to be inflecting.
From what I remember from Japanese class, yes. There are a lot of what my teacher called “hesitation noises”. I’m not sure what the cultural reason is behind it; perhaps it’s somehow socially polite to indicate to others that you’re thinking about what’s just been said. Then again, it may just be something like “neh”, the “don’t you agree” sentence suffix that all native Japanese speakers are doomed to utter a billion times in their lives.
Also, don’t forget that Japanese speakers tend to use more syllables than English-speakers to express the same idea. And, in anime, it is considered vitally important to match mouth flaps.
It’s not particular to anime. When translating movies to other languages for dubbing purposes, translators will often be told to match not only the meanings of words, but the duration of speech as well. So while a “Yeah, sure,” would suffice for getting a meaning across, they might change it to, “Yeah, sure, that’s fine, thanks a lot!” if that more accurately reflects how much speech there is.
Not only that, but English speakers tend to use more syllables than Japanese speakers to express the same idea. Some things are simpler to express in one language, some things in another. So the most natural translation from one language to another will sometimes get longer, and sometimes get shorter. When it gets shorter, you need to add words to keep the same length of dialog, and when it gets longer, you need to talk faster and run sentences together.
Of course, there’s a correlation between what things are easy to say in a language and what speakers of that language talk about more often, with the result that translations from any language to any other tend to get longer, regardless of what the languages are.
Hijack, but related to translated-“noise” sounds: I’d noticed that Karate Kid’s Mr. Miyagi used “yush” as a generalized uh/um/well/ugh/sigh expression. I thought it was a Pat Morita-ism, until KK2, where at least one other Okinawan character also spoke like that. Another J- or Okaniwa-ism?
‘Yoshi!’ is a fairly common exclamation - it’s pretty much equivalent to ‘YEAH!’ in English. The fifth entry here is the word in question.
The pronunciation (‘yosh!’) is a result of a feature of Japanese speech which tends to under-pronounce the short ‘i’ and ‘u’.
Moving to Cafe Society.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
This is pretty much it. The oddities the OP has observed don’t have much to do with the Japanese language itself or Japanese-to-English translation, it’s because of the difficulty of creating a translation that approximates the speaking time/syllable count of the original. Sometimes a character has to say more or less meaningless stuff to make the timing come out right. Other times what they’re saying has to be simplified in order to make it fit. This is one reason why many people prefer to watch foreign language film/television with subtitles – the translation can be somewhat more faithful if it doesn’t have to match up with on-screen mouth movements.
I can’t find the interview right now, but I remember reading one with Neil Gaiman about doing the English language version of Princess Mononoke. He said it was wonderful whenever there was a scene where a character’s face was turned away, because then he could write dialogue for them without having to worry much about the timing.
As far as the multitude of little noises go, this is it. Japanese speakers give constant feedback when they’re engaged in a conversation to let the speaker know they are listening. It’s actually a bit annoying sometimes because the interjections are constant and mostly meaningless. It’s also a bit eerie when you’re watching TV and an entire studio audience responds the same way at the exact same time. When I’m talking to my family and friends back home in English I have to consciously tone this down so that I don’t sound like a weirdo.
Conversation styles are different. Japanese speakers take turns speaking, not yielding the floor until they are done. The analogy I’ve used is that conversation in the US is like tennis, while in Japan it’s like bowling. That leads to long stretches of abnormally long dialog by English-speaking standards. Also, while speaking, there might be “thinking noises” that are made to fill the space so that the other person knows that speaker A hasn’t finished talking yet. Rendering it in English you’d get something like, “Hey, Jeffuhhhhhh, I was wonderingmmmmmif you’d like to go get something to eat latererrrrrrrrrrif you’re free.”
You can’t leave any space for thinking or the other person will assume you’re done and start their turn. Since Japanese speakers tend to be vague and deliberately leave thoughts unfinished sometimes, trailing off in the middle of a sentence is pretty common, so that’s not a reliable indicator that they’ve finished. You also can’t talk over another person or interrupt most of the time without looking really rude, much ruder than is the case in English. Differences due to translation also have their part, but a good deal of the oddness is directly due to the original language’s speaking style.
What Max Torque said about “ne” is not even an exaggeration. You can practically have whole conversations using just different inflections of “ne.” It functions as a tag question (“Isn’t it?”) acknowledgment, interjection, sound of agreement, indication of surprise, intensifier, etc. It’s one of those elements that’s so useful that even minimally proficient non-native Japanese speakers appropriate it for use in English. And yeah, you’ll probably say it about eleventy-bajillion times in your life while speaking Japanese.
Heh. I’ve been taking Japanese one night a week for the last few months. So far the only phrase that’s crept into my normal English speach is “So desu, ne?”
ah the japanese sounds and grunts, I love 'em. aside from uhn and Uh-hnnn (yes and no, respectively) they have billions of 'em. My favorites are Erruuuuu? (think that grunt from Home Imrovement) as a sound of surprise, like a “really?!” and the “ano… eto… to… ee? to… ano…” combination “er… ummm…uh… huh? uh… er…” another good one is “uso!” which is like a hyper-exclamative “so” or “right.”
sometimes when you’re speaking people will just say “so” or “so ka” over and over as you’re talking
Oh yea, and “ne” can be confused with “ne” pretty easily 
one being used as an “isn’t it?!” (or “right?”) and one being used like “hey” so I’ve been confused with someone saying “Ne ne… ne?” and just “ne ne ne” (hey, hey… (isn’t this) right?) and (hey hey hey! (like, hey, pay attention to me!)
@Pochacco; haha, I use that. Though where I live everyone just says “so de ne” like “so da nay” so when my parents came to visit I said “so so so” and “so de ne” all the time. They laughed at me constantly.
It gets even more confusing when using MSN with Japanese friends in Japanese. When ending with an ne, I usually resort to using question marks if necessary.
I’ve noticed something similar in old SNES games, like Cybernator for example. While gliding back to Earth during a cut scene, there are lots of utterances like “…”, that don’t seem to bear any relation to the plot.