Exact 1 to 1 translation are literally impossible even with subtitles. English and Japanese are 2 very different languages culturally and structurally. As someone who is learning Japanese here are my personal preferences regarding translation especially regarding dubbing:
Honorifics and diminutives should generally not be kept in the English dubs. They do not really sound all that natural in the English language at all. They should be replaced by whatever makes sense regarding context, character relation and personality, and even in some cases nation. Sometimes nicknames may be an appropriate replacement (For example Yachiru calls Kenpachi Kenny in the Bleach dub which is a pretty good substitute for Ken-chan in English), sometimes replacing it with the character's name may be appropriate (very rarely do you refer to your sibling by their status in English) and depending on context sometimes maybe even keeping them in may make sense. In most cases though replacement or removal is the most appropriate solution.
Rewording/Punching up dialogue can sometimes be very important. Lines as written in Japanese may sound very awkward or redundant in English via a direct translation or may sound very generic. Rewording dialogue to sound more natural in English can avoid the audience feeling weirded out by the dialogue, and in some cases exaggerating what is already there can possibly even add more emotion to it. As controversial as 4Kids was, they tended to be really good at adding a bit of flavor to lines that were originally rather sterile via a direct translation by adding in slight jabs at other characters and some added humor. Yu-Gi-Oh was a great example as a lot of the trash talk was punched up considerably compared to a direct translation of the Japanese version which made the characters seem more confident in their strategies by allowing them to trash talk their opponents a bit more. Seto Kaiba was already a lovable jerk in the Japanese version, but he was made even more snarky and rude in the dubbed version with the punched-up dialogue that it added even more personality to him while still being in line with the original intention. Punching up dialogue can be a bit of a fine line though as sometimes it could lead to unintended consequences such as the original Dragon Ball Z dub adding in some trash talk from Vegeta during his initial fight with Goku claiming that it was Bardock who created the artificial moon and that he was just "an average fighter but a brilliant scientist" in order to add some dramatic tension that Goku was going to lose to something his own father created, but it directly contradicts the events of the Bardock TV special where we see that Bardock was not actually a scientist but a pretty powerful warrior. It could introduce big continuity issues like that. In other cases it could also potentially go against some of the core themes of the work. In the English dub of Dragon Maid Season 1 when Tohru begs to be Kobayashi's maid the dub adds in a remark of her "not being into women or dragons" which definitely goes against the lesbian undertones of the series. Overall, when done right it can have a huge impact on the performance and writing quality of the dub. Some reccomendations to look into that have these are the Yu-Gi-Oh franchise (even if it is censored the in-duel dialogue is more what i am talking about), the Pokémon franchise, the incomplete dub of Interspecies Reviewers, Yu Yu Hakusho, and the Shaman King dubs.
Added slang and dialects and accents. I love when this is done since it helps add realism to these shows. This is also very controversial since it can very easily go into "how do you do fellow kids" territory, but when done right it can do so much. Regarding dialects and accents this is a good thing especially when the cast has characters from different cultural backgrounds. The Jojo part 6 dub did a pretty good job at this by adding in a little bit of Spanish into Ermes' dialogue in natural places, just like a lot of Latin-American people I know do where I live. It adds realism and makes these characters actually feel like they come from the country or region they are supposed to, and hiring actors from these places can add an extra layer of realism to this.
Jokes and puns tend to need to be rewritten entirely. Since Japanese and English are so fundamentally different, we may not find the same things funny, or a pun may make sense only in one language. This tends to lead to creative workarounds needing to be made. That Azumanga Daio reference of PM Mori being changed to Bill Clinton is a good example of this but there are quite a few examples of Japanese wordplay that just would flat out not work in English and just need to be changed to work.
Bring back Dubbed songs. It was really cool to see English renditions of iconic songs like Dan Dan Kokoro Hikareteku, We Are, and Dragon Soul, but we rarely ever see dubbed versions of songs in anime anymore, especially done by native speakers. Dragon Ball Super and Jojo Parts 4-6 have English versions of their opening themes, but they are sung by the original Japanese vocalists which leads to mixed quality as some of them are really good, but others feel really clunky due to the singer not having native level English skills. I just like that extra effort to translate the songs and have them sound natural in English.
I'm ok with dubs editing content that may have been accidentally made offensive in the Japanese version. What I mean by this are editing lines that may have unintended racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic etc. undertones. Censorship generally is not a good thing, but in cases where something may have a completely different worse meaning in one country it probably makes sense to change it. A great example would be how Jynx from Pokémon was changed to have Purple Skin so that it didn't look like blackface. Pokémon definitely didn't intend to be racist, but the dark face and big red lips definitely raises a few red flags for international audiences due historical issues with racism towards black people, so it made sense to edit it. With LGBT stuff this is definitely sure to get people mad at me. I am a trans woman myself, so I tend to be rally uncomfortable with stuff that is hateful as I want everyone to be able to understand us and see us as regular people. Sometimes anime accidentally does things that cross a line like that unintentionally. A great example would be how the anime adaptation of Re-Zero decided to hide the trans identity of the character Ferris Argyle referring to them as a boy and by their deadname unlike the source material in the light novels. If I were dubbing the series I would go with the original light novel version of the character with the correct name and terminology. Another example would be Miyuki from Yu Yu Hakusho who was a minor villain who was a trans woman. Yusuke said some pretty invalidating things to her when he found out about her identity and about her not having gotten bottom surgery. Togashi as an author is very interested in trans people and has made great trans characters in future works but his first attempt at a trans character in Miyuki just looked like something that would be written by someone who hates trans people due to how he was still learning about us. I would have completely removed the line about her genitals and rudely misgendering and invalidating her from the dub since it was clearly unintentionally bad when you see Togashi's later work. The CN version of the dub did fine by completely changing her secret being that she was trans to being that she was faking her injuries, but I think her being trans could have been kept and instead of Yusuke feeling ok to beat her up because she isn't "fully a woman", that it could have been changed to something as simple as her gender being irrelevant to the matter at hand. This is probably gonna trigger some hateful responses so yeah...
Thats pretty much everything on my mind at the moment. Some of these are pretty controversial but these are just my personal takes that I have gathered by seeing what works, what doesn't, personal experience, and my current level of Japanese studies. |