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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WizarDru" data-source="post: 1773718" data-attributes="member: 151">It really depends on the individual show/translator/writer/production team.For example:  many of the shows I watch these days fall in one of two categories, access-wise:  download or DVD.  For some shows (such as, say, GadGuard or Lost Exile) I see them advertised here in the US, watch some previews and then purchase it on DVD when released here.  However, when I'm feeling experiemental, I go out to any number of bittorrent locations and download the latest in fansubs, which may be six months to two years ahead of the market.I point this out because I've discovered that certain groups translate show much better than others.  For example: in the case of Samurai 7, I've seen the show dubbed by two different groups of fans.  Each one approaches the material differently, and their translations reflect that.  In one group's version, the peasants who've come to town (hoping to hire the samurai to defend their village from the bandits) are translated in a fairly straightforward fashion.  The other group, however, translates them more accurately...because the peasants speak an odd regional dialect.  Listening to the actual speech of the original voice-actors, you can clearly hear the differences in their speech patterns, and the translators try to capture the oddity of their speech patterns.  You don't need to know Japanese to hear the very different cadence of the language.  Which is better?  I don't know.  The more accurate translation doesn't necessarily help me as a viewer, even if more accurate.  But is that a function of their choices or the source writing?So you've got three levels of abstraction:  quality of the actors, quality of the original writing and quality of the translation.  Combine this with archetypes and social tropes which are from a different culture, and what might work for a Japanese audience doesn't work for a US audience, necessarily.  Consider the incredibly self-referential anime Magical Shopping District Abenobashi: it's a series that features characters with Osakan accents (as opposed to the standard Tokyo accent most commonly heard and used in Anime), has tons of cultural in-jokes and very sly references to other anime that only hard-core anime fans would get, and features lots of humor that just wouldn't translate well without liner notes.  (example: if learning that one of the characters was Abe no Seimei means nothing to you, and his having an Osaka dialect would be considered a joke in and of itself, consider an episode of the Simpsons featuring the Marge and Homer talking about a barn-raising, and Marge saying "Thank goodness it wasn't those good-for-nothing Mennonites", and then they show some Mennonites in an alley playing dice and smoking...)Most shows aren't that extreme, of course.  But sometimes it's hard to make that distinction between the translation and the writing.  Big O II, for example, is clearly (to me) a case of really, really obtuse writing.  Was it bad?  I'm not sure...but I know that the original writing is to blame, not the translation.  By the same token, watching an episode of One Piece or Shaman King, I know that the problem is the translation, as the comic is not nearly as annoying.  And finally, let's be clear: the US is not seeing the full breadth of anime and manga in the big releases.  Master Keaton is a great series, but very understated....it doesn't have the big flash of a Gundam series or the fanboy fantasy aspect of a Love Hina.  But even that's changing, so we'll see.  I'm still thrilled daily at the new releases, and the state of anime in the US.  I still remember paying $35 per tape for VHS copies of anime from Laserdisc, back in the early 80s.  Yikes. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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