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The interesting thing about translation, is that it’s really just another form of adaptation.
Just like how you have to change things when you adapt a movie into book to better fit
that format, so to must things be lost and gained in the process of changing something
from one language to another.
Sure most translations strive to convey the general meaning of what’s being said, and
usually only make changes to help the sentence or joke or whatever sound more natural in
English, but there are plenty of examples of this being done awfully.
I’m sure we all remember how 4Kids ruined a generation by referring to rice balls as
jelly donuts, for example.
But changing Japanese Thing A into English Thing A or potentially into English Thing
B is about as basic as this problem gets, and today I want to look at one of the more
complicated translation jobs I’ve seen, and how various different people from various
different groups went about tackling it.
So let’s talk about the Psycho-Pass movie.
Now, I originally threw in a spoiler warning here, but after I finished writing this, I
realized I didn’t really spoil anything.
I mean, I’m showing footage of stuff that happens, but without context it won’t mean
anything to you.
But if you feel like you need it, then here’s your spoiler warning, but otherwise you should
be fine.
So here’s what you need to know.
Psycho-Pass is a detective cop drama anime set 100 years in the future, and takes place
in a cyberpunk version of Japan.
...and that’s about it for the sake of this video.
So translation wise, things were mostly smooth sailing in the first season of the anime,
as Japanese Thing A got translated into English Thing A without difficulty, and for the most
part it ended there.
But in the movie however, the main character, Akane, flies outside of Japan to somewhere
new, and it’s here that the problems begin to arise, because most of the characters in
this new setting canonically speak English.
So in the Japanese version of the anime, Akane is Japanese, speaks Japanese, and lives in
Japan, as you would expect.
So when she travels abroad, most of the people that she meets speak English, a different
language.
Now a lot of you savvy anime viewers might already know where I’m going with this,
because anime has a history of getting Japanese actors to speak awful broken English Or “Engrish”
for these scenes, and the same is sadly true of the Psycho-Pass movie.
Now normally this isn’t much of a problem, because it’s usually used as a one off thing,
and is easy even for native english speakers who recognize how awful it is to overlook.
Unfortunately, because the English speaking characters are such a huge part of the plot
in the movie, we have to listen to their English again [example] and again [example] and again
[example].
It honestly makes the movie unwatchable for me,
just because of how frequent it is.
It’s like watching the Godfather but if all the dialogue was sped up so it sounded
like it was being said by the Chipmunks.
It robs the movie of any seriousness it was trying to convey as I laugh over all the dialogue.
But that shouldn’t be an issue because there’s a dub, right?
Well let’s just switch over to that, shall we?
So in the first season of the dubbed anime, the characters are canonically Japanese and
live in Japan, but all speak English.
It doesn’t make any sense if you think about it for too long, but it’s sort of a conceit
of all dubs and it’s an easy enough thing to suspend your disbelief for.
And hey, since Funimation hires professional English voice actors, they’ll be able to
remove all the Engrish from the Japanese movie, and make that watchable now, right?
Well, yes and no.
The voices are all replaced and do sound much better, but this breaks the plot in several
ways.
You see, this dub, like most dubs, is operating under the assumption that everyone, no matter
where they’re from, speak English, but because the plot of the movie is about a Japanese
person going over to an English speaking nation, there are a lot scenes that are based around
the idea that they can’t understand what the other person is saying, which doesn’t
make sense if everyone speaks the same language.
Here, I’ll show you what I mean.
This is a scene from the beginning of the movie, where these guys who all speak English,
are trying to talk to this guy who speaks Japanese to conduct some illegal goings ons.
Here’s what they did in the original Japanese.
[scene] As you can see, a scene based around the idea that they couldn’t understand each
other.
Now let’s look at how the Dub handles this.
[Scene] Now, credit where it’s that’s a pretty smart change.
Because EVERYONE speaks English in the dub’s world, they change the translator into a voice
identifier.
But that fancy trick only works once.
For example, here’s a scene that no longer makes sense in the English Dub.
[Scene]
Here, she just looks are her watch for no reason, which feels out of place and kinda
breaks the pace of the scene, because in the original she was activating a translator.
But what else can you do?
Completely switch things around and have the dub voice actors speak broken Japanese for
the new characters?
Actually that’d be really funny the more I think about it.
Konichiwa, Akane-san!
Ecchi, hentai baka kawaii, tonari!
Ching chong, ching chong bing ***!
Welcome to the Specially Administrated Zone.
So you can see the crossroads we’re at here.
The Japanese version is all but ruined by unlistenable Engrish, and while comparatively
being much better, the English version loses a lot in translation.
But what can you do?
Well, as Akane learns in the series itself, sometimes you need to operate outside the
law to get *** done, and that’s where the Engrish Eradication edition comes in.
Much like the fan recuts of films like Highlander 2 that remove all the alien ***, or the Star
Wars cuts that add original scenes back in as they were before George Lucas messed with
them, the Engrish Eradication Edition is a fan recut of the Psycho-Pass movie that seeks
to fix the subbed version, by redubbing the original broken English with Funimation’s
lines.
So for example, they take the audio of this guy speaking his line from the dub, and insert
it over the original Japanese take.
The end result is that the characters who are supposed to speak Japanese speak Japanese,
and the characters who are supposed to speak English speak English.
Fluent English.
For example, let’s watch that same meetup scene from earlier, but this time from the
Engrish Eradication edition.
So already, that’s a genius solution, but it goes even further.
You see, it would be weird for Akane to switch from perfect Japanese to perfect English,
and you would easily be able to detect the change in voice actors, so the solution they
decided on was that the Japanese characters in the film like Akane and Kogami, still speak
their broken English from the original sub.
[Scene.]
This is WORLDS better than what we have previously, because instead of the Engrish holding the
movie back, now it’s actively enhancing it, because there’s this weird sense of
three-dimensionality that gets added to the main cast in the Eradication Edition.
It makes them feel like real people who are trying to speak a different language as best
they can, and the fact that they’re not perfect at it is a very humanizing thing.
Granted that was also in the original sub, but all the other people who should’ve spoken
perfect English having equivalent skills kinda took away from it there.
Honestly, I think the Eradication Edition is the best way to watch the Psycho Pass movie.
Not that the dub is bad mind you, in fact I actually think it’s one of the best dubs
Funimation’s made, but the Eradication Edition worked out such a simple and perfect solution
to what was a tangled web of complex problems, that, I kinda consider it a work of art all
it’s own.
So, as long as you don’t mind raising your Crime-Coefficient a bit, I highly recommend
seeking it out.
Special thanks to my wonderful Patreon patrons...