March 4th Blog Post - Japanese Video

 Hello again! This is Josh Jones, and I am one of Fuse-sensei's Elementary Japanese Students. For this blog post, I decided to watch episodes of one of my favorite anime's, and compare the differences in the translation between the subtitled version and the dubbed English version. When I first started watching One Piece towards the end of 8th grade, I would watch the show in the dubbed English version. I continued to watch the show in the English dub until I got to an episode where the English dub had not been dubbed yet. When I started watching the show in subbed, I instantly fell in love. The power-ups and special attacks sounded cooler and more authentic, and matched the vibe of the show. However, I noticed that there were slight differences between the dubbed and subbed versions in terms of direct translation. Looking back on those differences, I decided to watch a video explaining the differences. In the video, the narrator highlighted various reasons for the differences between the subbed and dubbed translations. The subtitles in anime provide a more direct translation of the Japanese dialogue, as they want to preserve the original meaning. Dubbing replaces the original Japanese audio track with an English audio track that is created using selected voice actors who have to interpret and deliver the translated dialogue based on their character. The English dubs focus on matching the pacing of the scenes as well as lip-syncing with the characters in the anime. The dub version also has to focus on localization, so that the cultural references from the show resonate with their target audience. This was really interesting to me, and I am glad that I finally decided to research the reasoning behind the differences in subbed versus dubbed. Take care, I hope you enjoyed my blog post and learned something new.