From Sub to Dub

Padman

Are there any companies that dub anime using the ACTUAL dialog from the original Japanese version?Ive read most of the Naruto manga and I decided to watch the anime and as you all probably know, him screaming "Believe it" over and over is extremely annoying, especially because he never actually says it in the manga.Im not sure if he says it in the original Japanese version but I somehow doubt it.

Do any dubbing companies stick to the Japanese script or are they all dumbed down for kids?

Numina

Short answer = Sure, loads. You're just coming across a lot of shows where the script is dumbed down for kids because that's probably the shows demographic. Naruto is aimed at teenage boys after all.

A literal translation from Japanese to English rarely makes coherent sense, that's why the best that can be done when it comes to translation is an interpretation, and even then what's being said can still appear pretty rigid. Also you have to remember that when you're watching shows where there's lots of screaming because the characters are POWERING UP there's a lot of times when the voice actors have to fill in the blanks for when there's lip movements, and I think maybe they'd rather ad lib instead of just screaming constantly.

By random, I picked Gundam Wing out of my collection and it's almost a word for word translation when it comes to comparing what the subtitles say and what they say in the dub, it is a fansub so that may be part of the reason, I'm not sure. Next I checked Cowboy Bebop, the sub and the dub vary a decent bit. Of course none of the storyline is changed, but there's expressions that the Japanese use that we won't recognise, so they're changed to something that a western audience will understand better (but still something that suits the character that's saying it) There's also changes made because of lips movements and angle changes. They've only got a certain amount of time to say something before the angle changes, and it has to match up to the lip movements fairly good, also not to mention that the style that they say it in has to be consistant with their body language, demeanor and the way the scene is set.

I doubt that there's a lot of dubs that could follow the actual japanese dialogue that wouldn't suffer greatly for doing so (unless it's something like Gundam Wing where there's a lot of technical terms being used, translation gets complicated when it comes to abstract ideas rather than technical terms and names). In a dub that's faithful to the translation though, most of the time they're at least basically saying the same thing.

Varik

That Naruto example does not really hold as in Japanese he says "Dattebayo" and "-ttebayo" at the end of sentences which doesn't really mean anything in English it's use to change the tone of a sentence and give it a more rough or childish feel and give Naruto a mischievousness character.

Just fitting the mouth movements in an anime is hard in manga they tend to keep it as close as is possible in English, look at all the volumes that even go so far a keeping the book size and panel layout.

Keeping it with Naruto, Shikamaru say "what a drag" in the dub but in the original manga/anime it's "mendokusē" which means "How troublesome", which does not sound so good in English.

megaten

Direct translations are usually awful. A good translation will try to convey the intention and meaning behind what was said rather than the specific words used.

K.O.Kiki

Rather, a good LOCALISATION is what you want -- not a pure translation.

Video games have this problem also.