Why do some anime dubs change so much of the actual story?(Vampire Hunter D spoilers)

Great Debates
1

I recently got Vampire Hunter D on DVD. It used to be a guilty pleasure of mine, when the only version I had seen was the English dub. Now there’s nothing guilty about it, but I have some big questions about the choices made when dubbing it.

They change major plot elements in the English version! It’s not bad enough that a teenage girl sounds like a middle-aged woman, or that the vampire hunter sounds like a smarmy used-car salesman - I could understand not being able to get appropriate voice actors on a budget. I can SOMEWHAT understand the reasoning behind changing a part where a character said (paraphrased by me) ‘I used to think of her as my daughter, but now I see she is a beautiful woman and wonder why I haven’t raped her’ to ‘I used to think of her as a young girl, but now I see she is a beautiful woman, a beautiful woman’ (though the dubbed version is still unrated and recomended for mature audiences, so it seems a bit pointless). What I can’t understand is the number of arbitrary changes in the plot. As an example, there is a scene in the English dub when someone reveals that D is half-vampire. Doris says something like ‘That’s OK, we knew from when we first saw you’. What??? It seems they replaced the dialogue in an EARLIER scene where this aspect of D’s background is revealed to Doris and she is shocked by the revelation. In another scene where Doris is leaning on D in a bathrobe (trying do seduce him) his vampiric nature comes out from seeing her neck so close, he starts to grow fangs and is trying to control himself, Doris tells him ‘You can drink my blood if you want to’ and he pushes her away, she cries out his name, he says ‘I’m sorry’ and walks off. In the English version she tells him ‘You can if you like’ (which opens up the possibility she is talking about something else, her face is buried in his chest and can’t see the transformation, just tell he’s breathing hard), he pushes her away, she says ‘I love you’, he says ‘I know’ and walks away. His later conversation with his hand (it’s a strange anime) reinforces the idea that Doris was offering sex, not blood.

There’s tons more. In the original version Doris’ little brother Dan acts and talks pretty much like a brave and precocious 8 year old, while he seems like a whiney teenager in the English dub. Theres a part where Doris is being confronted by the mayor and town elders because she was bitten by a vampire and they are afraid she will turn into one herself. D explains that when he kills the vampire that bit her the curse will go away, and then he is asked what will happen if he fails in his mission. In the original Doris says ‘Then I’ll kill myself’ and Dan cries out ‘Sister!’. In the English version she says ‘Then I’ll leave town and never come back’ and Dan says ‘And I’ll come with you’. There is a part where one of the evil vampire’s henchmen screwed up and he comments that he can’t return to the castle until he has killed D, it explains some of his desperate actions later, he knows he will be killed if he goes back unsuccessful. In the English version the danger he is in is never mentioned except in one later scene, where it doesn’t make sense sense you didn’t get to hear what he thought earlier.

I just can’t understand why they made so many changes. It’s not just changes in what is being said, either, there are scenes where one person is talking in the original and in the English dub a TOTALLY DIFFERENT PERSON in the same scene is talking. There is one scene at the very beginning where the big bad vampire is about to bite Doris - it’s a good scene. you see him standing before her, you hear his cape swish as he opens one arm, then the other, then he embraces her - no dialogue, I don’t think there was any music either. In the English dub they have the vampire talking - instead of the mostly-silence as he stands there, we get ‘Greetings, I am Count Magnus Lee, and since you are trespassing on my property I will now collect my due’ rushed out in what sounds like one breath. WHY??? The English version also has music in a lot more scenes than in the Japanese version, and the sound mix is really different, you can hear people’s footsteps throughout the Japanese version but not in most of the English version. And, perhaps weirdest of all, they dub the voices of monsters that don’t say anything in the original version - they replace one set of uneartly monster noises with a second set of goofy-sounding monster noises.

I can understand a need to paraphrase things in a dub, it’s obvious that they are able to say a lot more in Japanese in fewer words in some sentences, and sometimes it takes them a long time to say what would only take a few syllables in English, but I can see no reason to change plot points, insert background music, and change the noises that the monsters make! WHy do they do this???

2

I don’t know either. I really wish they wouldn’t.

But anyone know when the new Vampire HUnter D movie comes out?

3

Editors run amok.

The most entertaining thing I ever read from Piers Anthony was in itself a rather mediocre novel. The plot was not very memorable, something about survivors wandering around after a usual nuclear exchange. The entertaining part was that the first printing contract with it, back when he was just starting in the author game, took pretty much all control out of his hands. And the copy editors raked the whole manuscript over coals, outright changing several parts. Later on, he regained rights to the book, and had an edition published where he presented the original, with annotations marking every part that got changed. The combined endnotes were as long as the actual novel.

For a movie example (and a more extreme than usual one), Universal Studios tried very hard to butcher Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”; the “Love Conquers All” version they made of it was radically different than the directors cut.

As to why some people do this kind of thing to others’ work, I can’t quite figure out. I imagine once you start making changes to something, subsequent changes just get easier and easier to make.

4

I had that - it wasn’t a nuclear war, just massive depopulation caused by emigration after the invention of matter transmission. It was a prequel of sorts to the Cluster series. And yes, the changes the editors made were quite heinous…they even had a whole alternate ending that Piers had NOTHING TO DO WITH inserted.

5

There are many reasons why modifications could be made to an anime script when it’s being dubbed into English. Several of these factors are nearly impossible to work around. There’s the problem of translating between cultures, the problem of dealing with ambiguity and wordplay, the problem of speech timing.

Certain lines in a film may need to be edited if they don’t make much sense in North America. Obscure Japanese cultural references would be lost on most viewers of anime. Social expectations and mores in Japan are different from those in other parts of the world, sometimes resulting in scenes which are difficult for gaijin to understand. When confronted with a situation like this, the editor in charge of dubbing an anime film has three choices: either replace the Japanese material with similar local references, do a direct translation and risk confusing the viewers, or completely rewrite the scene.

I suspect that the scene you mention from Vampire Hunter D with Doris and Dr.Peringo falls into this category. In the English version, the possessed doctor’s threat of rape is implied rather than stated. The editors could have thought that doing things this way would have more of an impact on an English speaking audience. Alternatively, they may have changed the wording because they felt directly mentioning rape would be offensive to a North American audience.

Ambiguous phrasing and plays on words do not translate well. Anime which relies heavily on these things often need to be almost completely rewritten when they are translated into English. Sometimes layers of meaning are changed, or ignored, in a translation. Occasionally, they’re added. Even if you try to do a very faithful and strict translation of an anime (or any other work), chances are that the translated version isn’t going to have all the same meanings and connotations of the original.

Consider the first pun I ever laughed at in Korean. A beautiful young starlet says to Saojung, “Jal ja, nae gum gwa”. Saojung replies, “ye, nado kae gum gwa”… translated, that’s “Good night, dream of me”… “Okay, I too will dream of dogs”. It isn’t funny in English because “me” and “dog” don’t sound anything alike, and also because in English the subject of the first sentance isn’t ambiguous. Also, residents of North America are unlikely to know who Saojung is, and have probably never seen a “017” handphone commercial. This relates to the first problem, above.

The last great difficulcy in dubbing anime into English is that the translated lines spoken by the characters must occupy roughly the same amount of time as the original lines in Japanese, and the sequence in which the characters speak must be the same. If an anime character speaks some bon mot which ties up all the things previously said in just three words, and there are no equivalent three words in the English language which would capture all the original meaning, then the translator is in trouble. If any amount of time could be taken for this, the original three words could well be changed to a few sentances, or even a short speech. Unfortunately, that can’t be done.
There is one more reason why the vampire Hunter D dub may have changed the actual story… It was dubbed by Streamline Pictures, who were notorious for taking liberties with original stories during the dubbing process. While I was in university, we refered to any movie dubbed by Streamline as having been Macek-ered, in honor of the company’s founder Carl Macek. This studio would often re-splice movies to suit their dub, cut out huge sections of animation, and change plotlines, even endings, of films. All of this might be forgivable if not for the fact that Macek himself was not nearly so good a writer or director as he thought he was.

He did help to popularize anime in North America, and the success of Robotech probably helped start the anime craze of the 90s. On the other hand, there are many who hold him personally responsible for the fact that Hayao Miyazaki’s movies still haven’t all been released in English yet. My own personal feeling is that he was a wonderful promoter, but ranks somewhere below Ed Wood as a creative genius (how did anyone make the movie Windaria worse than it was originally!?!?).

6

If you’re watching anime dubbed into English for consumption by American children, you may find that if you remove the word “cousins” and insert the phrase “gay lovers” things make a hell of a lot more sense.

7

If you think Vampire Hunter D was bad, watch the first release of Akira. Oh the horrors. Shame I say! Shame!

I’ve heard that there are going to re-release Akira, both re-dubbed and re-subtitled with about 30 minutes of footage that was missing from the first release here in the US.

Things are getting better though…Princess Mononoke wasn’t treated too shabbily.

You have to remember that when dubbing Anime, you are very, very time constrained. Trying to convey everything in English that was said in Japanese, in the same amount of time, seems to me to be a daunting task.

One last point: Vampire Hunter D was originally dubbed into English years ago when Anime was not nearly as popular. As Anime’s popularity increases, so will the quality of dubbing and subbing. And hopefully that will also mean there will be pressure to stop changing the whole freakin’ story.

8

Also, for some reason American dub studios feel the need to match the dialogue with the lip flaps. Which is done in American cartoons, since the animation is done after the voice tracks are laid down, but the Japanese don’t seem to think it’s a problem. They never match because the animation comes first, from what I’ve read, which probably contributes to the greater emotional power of the Japanese audio track - they’re “acting” more because they can see what’s happening.

Plus, a Japanese seiyuu can be a celebrity - release CDs, be terribly famous, etc, etc, etc. An American anime voice actor… um, anyway. So the available quality is better.

Also, culturally we value different voice types in different roles. It even changes with time - operas with high tenor heroes seem a little funny to us now. Likewise, the Japanese choices for leading men are usually either higher or lower than we’re used to, and the women are definately not the same. So it’s a whole “feel” that seems strikingly odd when you watch things you’ve seen subbed in the dub.

I think the biggest reason the dub always sounds so idiotic, however, is simply because there’s a lot of cheeseball dialogue in anime, and it sounds a whole lot better in a language that I only know a smattering of.

9

Gay relationships, as someone mentioned, are almost always made hash of when an animé is packaged for western consumption. Kaworu and Shinji in Evangelion are one fairly egregious example (“I’m saying I like you”); the boy in Sailor Moon who was made into a girl in the Western release is, of course, another.

I’ll see if I can’t get Hamish to discourse on this.

10

I only have the first DVD which contains the first 5 or 6 episodes. I didn’t much care for that one so the odds of me purchasing more are next to nil. Are Kaworu and Shinji the friends from school?

Marc

11

Indeed I shall matt_mcl

This is one of my personal pet peeves. I’m very much a fanatic when it comes to animé, and I’m really frustrated by bad translations.

I can appreciate the more honest problems – matching the speed of dialogue, not being able to translate Japanese puns, and so on. It’s when editors feel they have to protect us that I feel really offended.

matt_mcl brought up the Shinji/Kaworu thing. Shinji and Kaworu are two boys in love from Neon Genesis Evangelion, one of the most profound and controversial animés to ever make it out here. ADVision, the North American distributor, was so nervous about the homosexuality, they deliberately rewrote the dialogue. Kaworu is gay in the subbed version, and Shinji is his understanding straight friend. In the subbed version, they’re both straight. ADVision even removed the picture on the original VHS tape cover – a picture of Kaworu and Shinji cuddling together.

But ADVision isn’t the only culprit. The Toonami version of Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon not only turns lesbian lovers Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus into cousins, it turned one half of a gay couple, the villain Zoicite, into a woman (no woman in animé is that flat-chested…). In Revolutionary Girl Utena, Juri is a lesbian in the subtitled version, and straight in the dubbed version.

It really depends on the translator. The lesser-known Manga Video company is usually pretty honest, though none of the really big, breakthrough animés use it. These days, ADVision, the Disney of animé, has a stranglehold on things.

Once I started to dive into the subject of mistranslation, I started to find out that homosexuality wasn’t the only thing edited out. Characters die a lot more in animé than we hear about. Their deaths are considered too scary for Westerners. Sometimes, ideas offensive to Christianity are removed, too. Often, when someone says “Thank God” in English, they’re actually thanking the ancestors.

Anyway, they’re coming out with an honest translation of Sailor Moon on DVD. Let’s hope Evangelion isn’t far behind.

12

Warning! Spoilers Ahead!

Kaworu is the Fifth Child, or at least that’s how he introduces himself, sent in to replace Asuka, who’s incapacitated. That’s episode 24. He falls almost instantly in love with Shinji, who’s a little more ambivalent about things. ven though the dialogue’s changed, it’s still very obvious what’s going on.

Just for the record, the dubbed version has the better script, but the voice acting is awful. I recommend seeing both. The subtitled version leaves out critical information, especially towards the end. But the dubbed version lacks emotion.

13

**

Have you ever seen Cyber City Oedo 808? It isn’t all that great an anime but it is really interesting to watched the dubbed version. In the dubbed version every other word is cocksucker motherfucker. But in the subtitled version there really isn’t all that much swearing.

Also they had a character named Benton who at first glance appears to be a woman. It has been quite a while since I saw this but in one version Benton has a deeply manly voice and in the other one he has a more feminine voice. But they didn’t change his sex in either version.

**

You might like a movie called Taboo. It is about a young samurai in 1865 Japan who some suspect is a homosexual. At least that’s what the description said but I didn’t watch a lot of it because it was half way through. I think it came out in 2000.

**

To be fair I don’t think they change that to avoid offending Christians, Muslims, or Jews. I think they do that because here in the west we do not worship our ancestors and would not understand someone thanking them. So instead they replace it with “thank god.”

Marc

14

You also often see yokatta translated as “thank God.” Yokatta literally means “it was good” or “it’s good [that it turned out this way]” but it carries a lot more weight in Japanese than the literal translation would suggest.

In fact, the literal translation almost always sounds flat: for example, in Final Fantasy Tactics, after you meet your former best friend whom you suspected to be dead for several years, the English translation says: “It’s good that I saw you again.” The emotional impact in Japanse is somewhat more potent.

15

Yeah, I think this is pretty likely as well.

Hamish, I am amazed that they would go so far as to change sexes. A lot of men in Anime are fairly androgynous any way, so I wonder what other Anime I’ve seen that has had the same kind of treatment…

How…irritating…

This kind of censorship stikes me as being particularly insidious.

16

We recently started watching Dragonball Z on Toonami (which I think could be improved with some serious editing). Since we haven’t watched long and didn’t know anyone’s backstory, my husband did a little research on the web and was surprised to find that Kame was often referred to as “God.” That had to have been changed to make it more pallatable to westerners. What red-blooded American wants their eight-year-old watching a program in which the omnipotent Supreme Being is portrayed as an old wrinkly green dude with antennaes who can’t even wipe out an evil alien or two without help? Damn furriners mocking our values and subverting the minds of our youth, is what they’d say! Theoretically. It’s just better to be safe than sorry :stuck_out_tongue:

17

**
Are you sure he didn’t mean kami? From what I can remember off the top of my head kami were spirits/gods of nature and there were plenty of them to go around.

**

:slight_smile: That would be funny. But I don’t think their concept of those lesser gods/spirits would be the same as ours. Maybe if we were talking about Amaterasu the sun goddess but not all kami. But then I don’t watch DBZ so maybe this green guy is suppose to be the supreme being.

Marc

18

Yeah, but CPM has picked up the rights to not only the Black Rose Saga but the Utena movie, which is coming out on DVD in November. I await the results with profound amusement, as any attempt to produce a “safe” dub of the rest of Utena will result in maybe five minutes of footage.

Also, the movie DVD is supposed to come with a director commentary track! I can’t wait to get profoundly drunk and see what on earth he’s got to say about this piece of work.

19

<grin> I don’t know exactly. In DBZ, the wrinkly green guy was supposed to be the “Guardian of the Earth” and his name was Kame or Kami. But when my husband was researching the series, the websites he looked at simply called the character god (don’t know if they used a big G or little g). And he isn’t even portrayed as any kind of spirit, he’s an being from another planet assigned to protect this one. Furthermore, he’s been replaced by a new guardian, a little green kid named Dende (does that name mean anything?). I would think the idea that god could be killed off, deposed, whatever, and replaced might also be offensive to the average Westerner, especially since this series is primarily marketed at their children. So while most changes dealing with spirituality or religion might be made simply to avoid confusing Western audiences, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if this was done to avoid offending them and making the series unmarketable.

I was interesed in the prior posts about Steamline Pictures. I’m still pretty much an anime novice, Toonami being my only real exposure, but I still managed to stumble across and fall in love with 3x3 Eyes, and I’ve got The Perfect Collection, which was distributed by Streamline. The ending is a cliffhanger, and a rather maddening one at that, and I’ve heard that the follow-up collection, The Divine Demon, is unsatisfying, though I haven’t seen it yet myself. Now I have to wonder how different a subbed, unedited version might be.

20

Carl Macek was a long way off being the first of these.

In 1972, there was a very popular anime series, Gatchaman, in Japan. It gave rise to two sequels, Gatchaman 2 and Gatchaman Fighter.

It first appeared on American screens in 1978 as Sandy Frank’s “Battle of the Planets”, and hooboy, talk about some changes.

The hermaphroditic mutant villain, Berg Katse, became the lipstick-wearing Zoltar and Zoltar’s sister Mala - two characters for the price of one - while almost all the violence and death disappeared, replaced by a burbling robot who assured the kiddies that “everyone was evacuated in time” and “he was only stunned, not killed”, that sort of thing. One of the good guys got a speech impediment instead of a smart mouth. At the end of the original Gatchaman story arc, one of the main characters - one of the good guys - got killed. Those episodes weren’t even translated.