More people screwing with me. Well, not _personally_...

[chaotic_nipple]

I'm currently watching the first episode of "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex". As is my wont, I have the subtitles on, even though the audio is in english. The subtitles don't match the audio _at_all_. With the production values involved here, I'm sure they could have hired a competent transcriber. I can only conclude that this is a deliberate "homage" to the traditional dubs-vs-subs rivalry in anime fandom. It was amusing for the first five minutes, but it got old real fast. :-P

Comments

[steverolston.livejournal.com]

But which translation did you think was better?

[chaotic-nipple.livejournal.com]

Not speaking Japanese, I just don't know. The voice acting is superb, but the subtitles seem to be decent too. They contain the same information, just phrased completely differently. I bet the subtitles were produced by a different translator(s) entirely, and the two were deliberately isolated from one another. An interesting experiment, but the results got old real quick.

[madlycool.livejournal.com]

The subtitle are probably more literal (although i know from French subtitles that they're not exact, and the last anime i saw they translated 'sensei' with the teacher's name). With dubbing, at least quality ones, they try to alter the text to sync up with the mouth movement.

[bratling.livejournal.com]

that. and as someone else pointed out, cultural jokes are changed, updated, or just dropped.

watching GitS:SAC fansubs with a friend who speaks japanese natively was eye-opening.

[cmorley.livejournal.com]

Have you seen "Godzilla: Final Wars"? They have some fun with dubbing American actors.

[signy1.livejournal.com]

You get that with a lot of subbed anime. The dub track is almost always slightly different from the translated subtitles-- sometimes the difference is just a matter of trying to synchronize the words to the mouth movements, and sometimes its more like a general reimagining of the text. Different jokes-- especially culture-specific jokes-- are added or taken away. Happens a lot.

[inhuman14.livejournal.com]

and then there's the All your base are belong to us. But that was in a video game.