Doc: As a translator, my question to Pioneer (and their critics) would be — did the original writers of Bastard *expect* those puns to be visible. Many anime and manga creators, including Tezuka, often put atrocious puns in their work for their own amusement, which makes it very difficult for foreign translators to rule properly on how something should be translated. Naming your bad guy after Charles Aznavour, for example (Gundam) is only funny if you don’t know who Charles Aznavour is.

Also, Pioneer’s direct transliteration of the names in _Bastard!!_, without reference to the (English language) heavy metal puns.

A lot of the other issues you mentioned I can live with, knowing a good amount of the Japanese language, and having lived in Asia I realise that a lot of the humor, religious, historical, and cultural concepts are not easily translated. Hell, some concepts or even cultural things require extensive translator notes (like in the old days) to make them understandable so I can deal with them being changed slightly.

Still its nice to see a VA that cares enough to try and round up their co workers, same thing happened with David Hayter when silicon knights remade the third metal gear game for the gamecube, though when listening to the dialogue in game, they don’t sound as committed as they did for the playstation version several years earlier.

I apologise for writing far more than I should.

Duck: Checking on page 599 of the Anime Encyclopedia, Revised and Expanded Edition, I see that you are quite right. Don’t know what I was thinking. It was Southern Cross, and the moon was removed, not added. I remember reading about it in an interview with Carl Macek. Actually, I have this awful feeling that I was the one who interviewed him about it, as it was the first time I heard the term “colour separation overlay.”

Chris: dubs are separate products. Often the rights to them revert to the Japanese licence holders with the expiry of a licence, leaving the Japanese free to sell them on, but some companies end up owning their own. I have known of several occasions where dubs (and even subs) have existed in different versions in different territories, because, for example, a US rights-holder wanted to charge a British buyer too much to use their translation. E.g. in the case of Plastic Little, Kiseki wouldn’t pay ADV their asking price for the subtitles, and so commissioned their own translation in the UK. For similar reasons, there are different US/UK versions of Kekko Kamen, although I think the only version you can buy in the UK now is the US one, and not the UK variant that I translated.

#2 - Matt Greenfield maintains that Martian Successor Nadesico was the hardest comedy to develop in English, compared to the insanity of Excel Saga or the wit of Azumanga. At Tomo-dachi 1 in Derry, he participated in an excellent discussion on dub vs. sub (first time I realised about line length), and gave us a detailed look inside how they approached and recorded Nadesico. It was the puns, he said, that were the hardest thing to find equivalents for, that and the amount of physics-based humour.

I’m still confused on what the bbfc find acceptable, my friend has some episodes of 801st T.T.S Airbat, and in one episode that seemed like a slightly sexy version of Scooby Doo, I seemed to recall brief nipple shots and a nosebleed in a hot tub, yet it was passed as a PG.

I’m not too bothered about the lip syncing, but not at the cost of more profanity, when I played crisis core on the psp the other year I was partially surprised and enquired if the cutscenes were re-rendered to match the english storyline. When I learned they had matched the dialogue to the lip movements somehow they had retained the plot and it didn’t feel dumbed down. I’m also not a fan of useless catchphrases, Believe it!

I can’t say I’m surprised about the treatment of samurai pizza cats, because well the western version was produced by none other than Haim Saban, which pretty much made a tv line up from splicing japanese tv together, and not in a ‘heres 30 minutes of condensed takeshi’s castle’ kind of way. IT wasn’t until several years after watching episodes of Sailor Moon on fox kids I learned it was marginally more adult than that channel lead me to believe.

JS, I have one question though, why do some products get re-dubbed? (sometimes unnecessarily.) Akira I can understand as I never really followed the plot in the Cam Clarke dub as I did in the remastered version. But I noticed Ghost in the Shell’s stand alone complex series had been edited into a movie concentrating on the Main Laughing man story, devoid of the filler. but instead of being a simple edit, a new voice cast had been used