Bringing anime to American audience poses challenges

As printed in The Northern Light newspaper
Sept. 12, 2006

One of the more popular anime shows of recent years, “Bleach,” just premiered in America on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming block. But before it even aired, Internet fans debated the quality of the show’s translation and English voice-over, as those areas can change a great anime in Japanese to a poor one in English.

While these used to be huge problems in the past, the growing anime market has demanded higher-quality products, and most U.S. distributors are paying attention. Still, many anime fans prefer watching shows with the Japanese language track and English subtitles to get as close to the original meaning as possible.

Translating will never fully duplicate the exact meaning of the original words, as some words don’t have an English equivalent, but the difference usually isn’t significant. With “Bleach,” a few hardcore fans were upset that the word “Shinigami” was translated into “Soul Reaper,” though most agree the change was reasonable.

The translation challenge is greater when producing a script for English dubbing, since the number of words used has to be far less than what subtitles allow and timed with a character’s mouth movements.

Subtitles, on the other hand, can be more accurate, but they can also be stiffer and less natural than how characters speak, especially if an amateur does the translating. This can be true when some fans make their own subtitles for shows (called fansubs, which violate copyright laws) from the original material and distribute them over the Internet. Those who started complaining about “Bleach” have already been watching a fansub of every episode a few days after it airs in Japan. Fans like that are rarely happy with any translation or English dub; it can simply be that the English voice actor doesn’t sound the same as the Japanese one they’re used to, or that some words are translated differently from the fansubs they saw, no matter how accurate or well-voiced it is.

Anime fans should be happy, though; it wasn’t that long ago that anime would be changed completely – names, plot, characters – to fit an American producer’s idea of what people in the U.S. wanted to see. While that can occasionally still happen (“One Piece” and “Card Captor Sakura” come to mind), anime in general is left intact and the quality of translation and voice acting is better than ever. Some shows will still be edited for broadcasting on TV, but so was “NYPD Blue” when it showed on TNT, so that’s nothing particular to anime. Programming directors are catching on that anime isn’t always for children, and late-night programming like Adult Swim allows anime to be aired with very few, if any, edits. With quality dubs on TV and uncut subs on DVD, anime fans have it better than ever.