Pronounciations in Dubs
Why do people get so angry about pronunciations of Japanese names in dubs? The purpose of dubbing is to localize a film for an audience that isn’t familiar with the original language so that they can still enjoy the story on its own merit. People like me and most other anime fans, who want to hear the original Japanese speech and are somewhat knowledgeable about the culture and language, can watch subtitles. Nobody is forcing us to watch the localized versions. I certainly don’t. And I don’t complain about them either, because they are not aimed at me. In particulary there are lots of complaints over the American release of Ponyo and the various English-accented pronunciations of names like “Sosuke” or “Miyazaki”.
This is part of a Japanese cover to Harry Potter. The name has been adapted into the Japanese katakana syllabary. The romanized form is Harii Pottā. This is comfortable for Japanese speakers. Much more comfortable than twisting their tongues to try and pronounce “Harry Potter” with a proper British accent everytime they want to talk about it with their friends. I wonder how many people are going to start rallying against the Japanese for daring to localize English words and names into pronunciations which are more comfortable for the portion of Japanese who may not know English perfectly, which is the whole point of localizing a film in the first place.
But you know, maybe when doing English localizations, we should ensure that the voice actors are comfortable with the Japanese language, and will pronounce names with Japanese accents. For the sake of ensuring the best possible pronunciation and familiarity with the names, we should stick to Japanese voice actors only. However, since these Japanese actors may not all speak perfect English, we should have the rest of the film also be in Japanese as well to ensure smooth dialogue.
Wait….I think this exists. It’s called the original film. Maybe we should watch that instead. Amazingly, ignoring foreign localizations of Japanese media somehow gets rid of the problem of having to hear foreign pronunciations of Japanese words and names. Brilliant, eh? But to complain about localizations of foreign material for fulfilling their intended purpose?
2 responses so far
I get slightly irritated when people say “ma-n-ga” instead of “man-ga”. Grinds my gears.
I don’t really mind localized pronunciations of Japanese names and words in dubbed media, though I do find it awkward sometimes to have conversations with dub-only fans as they will pronounce things differently from you and then there erupts the whole debate of which is “more” correct. Does it make you an elitist just because the majority of things you watch are subbed and you thus pick up the original pronunciations?