2003-02-15 - 1:14 p.m.

In the world of anime, I don't like to watch shows in the English. Even if the translation is as close as possible, I prefer the original Japanese. There are two reasons behind this: voice actors and linguistic differences between Japanese and English.

First, voice actors:

I find a lot of the time, the English voice actors sound very fake, like they've got better things to be doing or they have no idea what they're talking about. I'll cite an example here of an English voice actor who I don't think did a particularly good job:

Example 1: No offense to the actress who played her (don't know her name), but the character of Excel from Excel Saga was not played particularly well. In the original version, the voice actress managed to be excited without being grating. This is just my personal opinion though.

Now, to be fair, voice acting is hard. You have to convey all of your acting ability through your voice instead of being able to use body language, etc. I personally don't think I'd be able to do it, but then I can't act even if I can use props, body language and any other helpful item.

Going back to the point though, most of the Japanese voice actors just seem to be either a bit more talented than their (mostly) American counterparts or perhaps more dedicated. Maybe there's some fundamental difference between the Japanese and American cultures that I'm not understanding and thus that makes the Japanese voice actors seem better to me.

Linguistics differences:

I don't speak Japanese fluently. I am studying it. I don't particularly hate English or love Japanese. I enjoy both languages and to be perfectly honest, I would rather speak Spanish because it makes so much more sense to me. Back to the point though, I'm not the kind of fan to sit and watch a show in Japanese simply because I hate any English in my show (sadly, I am not the Otaking). I don't hate English. English is good. English is one of my majors.

There are more subtleties (sp?) in Japanese. This is not the fault of the English voice actors, but I think that having different ways of addressing people can add so much richness to a show that English simply cannot duplicate. I'll give some examples:

Example 1: Anthy refers to Akio with the honorific "sama" in Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie. The use of the "sama" honorific towards Akio shows just how much Anthy respects and/or loves him because "sama" is used only in situations of high respect or with royalty, etc.

Example 2: In the Japanese language, there are multiple ways to say "I". There are more feminine ways, more masculine ways, more polite ways and cruder ways. In the anime Pretty Soldier Sailormoon the character Uranus (Tenou Haruka) uses the more masculine version of I, "boku", despite being a female character. It's simply a subtle linguistic happening that adds to the character being as she acts very masculine. On the other hand, one of the very feminine characters Moon (Tsukino Usagi) often says "`Atashi" which is, from my understanding the more feminine version of "I".

Example 3: There are words which can be used in the English language to make something harsher on someone's ears, but there aren't usually whole different ways of addressing people to deliver a crueler, harsher message. There are various ways of talking to a person. To say "you", for example, there are at least three ways of doing some, "anata", "kimi", and "omae". There are probably more ways of saying "you", but these are the three that I know. From my understanding, "anata" is the most polite while "kimi" is more relaxed and "omae" is used most commonly to speak to animals and thus is very rude to use when speaking to another person. In Gundam Wing, the character Heero is quoted as saying "Omae o korosu" which I'm told means something to the effect of "You will now die" or "I will kill you". The use of "omae" adds to the insult resulting in an extremely rude (and frightening) way of addressing a person.

It's because of differences in langauges like these that I prefer my anime in Japanese. I don't know if most people would look for, find and enjoy these linguistic differences, but they're part of the reason I'm so fascinated with anime. The English langauge, while very expressive, simply does not have very obvious ways to differentiate between male and female speech patterns, different versions of pronouns to use to make a phrase more or less insulting or honorifics. Yes, English does have the use of words like "sir" or "miss" or "madam", but overall English doesn't seem to be able to express the same closeness between to characters simply by pointing out that they refer to one another by only their first names.

It is possible that I'm thinking about this too much and should just sit back and enjoy my animation.

previous - next