Bad.
Really, does anything else need to be said?
Okay. For those that don’t know, dubtitles are the result of a couple of different things. When a dub script is created, it’s working off of the subtitled script (which is often what is provided by the Japanese licensor, which is then re-translated by the licensee). When that script is created, sometimes, in very rare instances, that dub script ends up being used as the subtitle script for home video releases. Whether it’s on purpose, laziness or licensor demands can vary and often we never really know. The only times we might know is because when it gets re-released, it’s fixed. But fixes are rare because it takes time, effort and money to redo a subtitle script and those rare times it happens you can imagine them just writing it off as a loss. Which is unfortunate, because even after all these years, those titles are still talked about.
What titles? Here’s the base list that I’ve seen bandied about, though there might be a few more and there are caveats to some of these.
- Air Master
- Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
- Kiki’s Delivery Service
- Tenchi Muyo!
- Yu-Gi-Oh!
- Pilot Candidate
- Tekken: The Motion Picture
- Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam
- Tekken: Blood Vengeance
- Akira (Bandai Visual)
- Castle in the Sky
- The Cat Returns
You can see more of modifications and changes made to releases in this discussion topic here.
Some of these are just awful. Pilot Candidate in particular annoys me because all we had was a close captioned dubtitle script because the freakin’ release wasn’t given subtitles at all. It was bilingual, but without subtitles. Others, like Tenchi Muyo as released by Pioneer all those years ago, was from a different time and was a launch title by a Japanese company setting up shop in North America. You could forgive it as it was early 90’s and enough was said that they largely didn’t do it again. Besides, the English script was better anyway! /rimshot
Most of these you see as products of the big companies getting involved, like Disney, and others are licensing/licensor issues such as Tekken or just the way Toei did things when they attempted, ever so briefly, to enter the market only to tuck tail and run after a miserable sales showing that was embarrassing. Never mind how eembarrassingthe releases themselves were.
But out of the hundreds and hundreds of releases that come out over the years – remember during the days of single volume releases when we’d have five hundred DVD releases per year? – this is largely the extent of dubtitling as it exists.
Which is, frankly, non-existent in a statistical sense.
Yes, it utterly sucks for fans of Air Master. I’m one of them! And for the Disney titles. Some did get fixed, like Akira in its re-release from FUNimation and Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam from Bandai Entertainment. The most one can hope for is a re-release through a different company that will do it right from scratch.
But in the end, what sucks about dubtitles is that people keep using them as an excuse to not buy licensed releases because they want to play to this belief that everything is dubtitled, or that subs are so poorly done that everything is just rotten to the core. Having quite a few friends that translate both manga and anime and seeing and hearing the horror stories of accusations, and looking at the process of how it’s done, it’s beyond a flimsy excuse. That, my friends, is the bad in all of those.
