Whereas I figure the original intent was for me to hear the dialogue in a language I know. Unless the English voice actors are far shittier than the original language voice actors, I’ll take the dubbed version.
Technically, yes. But, the animation is made to match the speech. When voices in a differemt language are added, the mouth moving, opening and closing rarely matches the spoken dialogue.
I dunno–while live-action dubbing gets really distracting to me, I’ve never been distracted by animated dubbing, even in a different language from the original. Maybe it’s just different expectations.
Uh, maybe we should get back on topic…
Considering how badly translated subtitles can occasionally be, I don’t consider the “original” version to have any greater fidelity than a dubbed one, unless you can understand the language well enough to watch it without subtitles.
I know enough Japanese that it’s jarring when a subtitle is mistranslated and frustrates me. (I am not nearly familiar enough with Japanese to watch an untranslated film and understand everything though.) Not to mention, you look away for a moment and you miss dialog. That is why I prefer films that are dubbed. Yes, the dub job may also have a mistranslation as well but as long as the dub is a good one, I’m not going to be distracted by mistakes the same way I will be with subtitles.
What were we thinking?!
Hear hear.
Astounding film.
The Arabic word قِبْليّ qiblī as a name for a wind really means ‘southern’, indicating that it blows from the south. The reason qiblī is used to mean ‘southern’ is that Mecca, the qiblah, the direction one faces to pray, is south from the point of view of the Levant or Iraq, where the early caliphates were located (Umayyad in Damascus and ‘Abbasid in Baghdad). If Arabs in say Somalia or Zanzibar used qiblī to mean south, that would be ironic, because Mecca is north from those countries.
Gibli is another name for the scirocco, which can blow from either the south or southeast, so I guess it still works as intended for Libya. (Scirocco itself is Italianized Arabic from sharqī, ‘eastern’).
I love the studio’s movies. There is no other animation on that level. I’m just unimpressed by the phonetic violence done to an Italo-Arabic word by the katakana, changing [g] to [dʑ]. It would be like pronouncing katakana as “chatachana.” How would Miyazaki-san like it if we changed his name to Miyazachi?
That’s practically guaranteed to be the case for live-action dubs. For anime, who knows? I’d still rather watch the original. I don’t understand Japanese, but, just like the dog that I am in spirit, I can still sense the emotions of the original voice actors.
Wait, you’d rather have dubbed dialog that is mistranslated and you don’t know it, than subtitled dialog where you can see that the translation is wrong? Seems like an odd preference.
For certain movies where dialog is really important, I like to turn on subtitles even when the dialog is in English so I don’t miss anything.
But yes, this is getting off topic. OTOH, this is the Pit! Being “off topic in the Pit” is almost an oxymoron! 
Yes because it doesn’t bother my immersion. If something is wrong I’d rather not know.
I love Cronos. Most of the dialogue is in Spanish. The version I recorded from HBO had subtitles added by the studio. When I watched with the Panamanian woman I was dating, she noted that some of the subtitles were simply wrong.
That’s fair. I think my opting for the subtitled version of Spirited Away is at least partly due to my extreme dislike of dubbed foreign live-action films. Just imagine watching a classic like Das Boot dubbed in English! 
A bad dub job is unwatchable for me, I’d like to make that clear too. 
It’s wildly inconsistent. For example — Disney had the distribution deal for Ghibli in the US for a few years. (Not any more, for good reason. Anyway.) Disney, in putting together the English dubs for the American market, had no faith in the movies themselves and hired “name” actors to re-voice the soundtrack. In short, they prioritized recognizability over appropriateness to make the movies easier to sell, and the Disney releases of the movies are painful to watch as a result.
I mean, I like Tina Fey, she’s a talented writer and performer, but she is not an animation voice actor.
Yeah. See my comment above about Billy Bob Thornton. Billy Crystal played a fire spirit (I cannot recall his name) in Howl’s Moving Castle. He did a great job. Wait, I think it was Calcifer? Phil Hartman voiced a talking cat in Kiki’s Delivery Service. He did a great job. But he had already established himself as a voice actor.
I remember reading an article than an American company was hiring American porn actors to dub hentai. The general feeling was that porn actors are paid primarily for the willingness and ability to have sex on camera. Their appearance was secondary. Their ability to act was an extremely distant third.
“Itsumo Nando Demo” by Yumi Kimura is one of my favorite songs. I loved the extra on how she wrote it and how Miyazaki-san liked it.
Yes! It’s one of those performances where translation is not necessary.
I like watching these movies in Japanese (with subs) because, well, they’re Japanese movies. Many of them are set in Japan, and even those that aren’t, the characters and stories are distinctly Japanese. Hearing the people in them speak American English just doesn’t feel right.
That’s exactly what I was trying to convey, my extreme example being Das Boot – a classic German movie, with German actors, in the German language, conveying a German perspective of submariners in the war. It’s a fantastic and very compelling movie with some strong moral messages, but totally ridiculous when dubbed in English.
P.S.- I don’t speak German, either. But damn, the sailors on that sub – represented by the original actors – had better be speaking German if I was going to appreciate the film!
Apropos of not very much, a few weeks after we first moved to Europe, I was flipping channels and stumbled on an old rerun of “Hogan’s Heroes”… dubbed into German.
As weird as you think it would have been, I promise you, it was actually much weirder.
This is how I know how to read childrens books in Norwegian. My ex-wife was an exchange student there, so she is fluent. We watched a lot of Scandinavian series and movies, mostly Norwegian and Swedish (languages are similar) and some Finnish (totally different!)
We used subtitles for my benefit, but it got to the point where I can read/write/speak kindergarten level Norwegian.
The spirit is easy to grasp in children’s books. I mean, my fluency in on the level of translating “Look! Spot runs. See Spot run!”
I can read aloud Norwegian, even if I don’t understand what I am reading, because I know the sounds and stresses of each syllable. Which is kind of weird.
Mine from Temu:
And a better photo than the ones in that post:
