Coming from an article over at Wildgrounds
What is this “super dub“? In fact, they’re trying to make the translation sounds more natural in Japanese.
…
what were you attempting with Super Dubbing to deal with this difference?
For example, Leonardo de Caprio, who plays Teddy, faces a woman working in the hospital and asks, “Were you a nurse?” If you change this to natural Japanese, just saying “Kankoshi?” However, in English when you say “Were you a nurse?” your lips move three times.
You know I have often spoken against “Only-dubbed Films” but considering the distributor in Japan has also distributed a subtitled print, I have no problem with this. But obviously… I have a bias for anything Japanese these days. I often talk about how much personality Japanese voice acting has, over let’s say American voice actors. I tend to attribute this upper-hand to the fact that America doesn’t often get films for dubbing, so their industry is not as developed.
Obviously dubbed films are different, even the trailer above sounds a lot more dramatic than what Shutter Island originally was, so you might actually miss a lot of the acting in this super-dubbed version. According to the distributor, they wanted to “super dub” [do I love the term or not?] the film because there’s a lot going on in Shutter Island that you [as in young people who don’t read much] might miss by reading the subtitles… valid?
As a general rule, no… that’s really not THAT valid. But here we are talking about Japan, and we’re talking about Japanese as a language. Think about having to read Kanji on screen while trying to keep up with the plot — don’t even think about what Chinese subtitles of Foreign films look like… or Chinese fansubs. You only get one mistaken stroke, and you totally missed the point of that bit of dialog.
As a person trying to learn Japanese on my own, that makes complete sense to me. Japanese subs are hard to read. And this is something that had never crossed my mind as a viewer.
Thoughts on Super Dubbing?
