Why some dubs were based on other dubs?

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TheRed259
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Why some dubs were based on other dubs?

Post by TheRed259 » Wed Jul 18, 2018 1:28 pm

Some DragonBall dubs were based on other dubs (mainly from France) and not on the original Japanese version. Even the Funimation dub was based on the Mexican one back then. Do you know the reasons behind these decisions?

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Re: Why some dubs were based on other dubs?

Post by Nightmare Wheel » Wed Jul 18, 2018 2:03 pm

The reason several dubs were all based on the French dub is because they were all made by the same French company, the AB Groupe.

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Re: Why some dubs were based on other dubs?

Post by sangofe » Wed Jul 18, 2018 2:56 pm

Nightmare Wheel wrote:The reason several dubs were all based on the French dub is because they were all made by the same French company, the AB Groupe.
I highly doubt all the different european dubs that were based on the AB video transfer were made by AB. AB didn't even dub the French dub - Sofi, who they hired, did. AB might have made the big green dub, but even that is uncertain.

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Re: Why some dubs were based on other dubs?

Post by Nightmare Wheel » Wed Jul 18, 2018 3:28 pm

sangofe wrote:
Nightmare Wheel wrote:The reason several dubs were all based on the French dub is because they were all made by the same French company, the AB Groupe.
I highly doubt all the different european dubs that were based on the AB video transfer were made by AB. AB didn't even dub the French dub - Sofi, who they hired, did. AB might have made the big green dub, but even that is uncertain.
Even if they weren't made directly by AB they're still drawing on material from AB. If they were hiring other companies to do the actual acting work it's still their dub, like how the early Ocean dub is still Funimation's.

As for the question of whether or not they did the Big Green dub I can say with certainty they did because one of the actors in it has talked about it.
https://www.behindthevoiceactors.com/Da ... mment52242
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Re: Why some dubs were based on other dubs?

Post by Robo4900 » Wed Jul 18, 2018 6:37 pm

It was cheaper and easier for European dubbing companies to import and translate French materials than to import and translate Japanese materials. Same reason as Funi getting materials from Mexico. Though Funi did still translate from Japanese, they just used translators who weren't any good, their only audio tracks were the Spanish dub and the M&E tracks, and their video master was a DigiBeta copy of Mexico's. Many of the AB-based dubs in Europe actually re-translated from French instead of getting new translations from the Japanese(Such as Big Green, or the German dub).

It is also worth noting that the Canadian English dubs were produced by AB Groupe, and did something similar to Funi for Dragon Ball and GT, aswell as the last few episodes of Z, where AB sent their video masters over to Canada for Ocean/Blue Water to put voices to, but Z reused scripts from Funi's dub(At least, it does for most of the run... It is possible those last few which used AB video masters are original translations; I've never checked to confirm this, but I doubt it), meanwhile GT was an original translation from Japanese done at Ocean/Blue Water, and DB was mostly based off of Funi's scripts, with many changes, corrections, naming convention adjustments, and several full episodes rewritten based off of translations from the original Japanese, though I suspect some of the corrections and minor alterations of Funi-based scripts were translated to English from the French dub's scripts.
One side-effect of this is that the Canadian dub of OG Dragon Ball inherits a lot of cuts from AB Groupe's master, while GT -- being later on, when AB tended to keep uncut masters -- was uncut aside from about 2 or 3 episodes which were edited to remove shots showing Goku's penis.
It also does mean that some voices in the DB dub seem to be based off of the French voices, apparently, since that's the audio they had on hand to reference.
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Re: Why some dubs were based on other dubs?

Post by TheRed259 » Wed Jul 18, 2018 6:52 pm

Robo4900 wrote:It was cheaper and easier for European dubbing companies to import and translate French materials than to import and translate Japanese materials.
So they imported DragonBall from France because it was cheaper. But who got the money? Toei, the French company or both?

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Re: Why some dubs were based on other dubs?

Post by Robo4900 » Wed Jul 18, 2018 7:18 pm

TheRed259 wrote:
Robo4900 wrote:It was cheaper and easier for European dubbing companies to import and translate French materials than to import and translate Japanese materials.
So they imported DragonBall from France because it was cheaper. But who got the money? Toei, the French company or both?
I would assume Toei got the money from them licensing the show, then AB Groupe got the money from them licensing the video masters and such.
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Re: Why some dubs were based on other dubs?

Post by sangofe » Thu Jul 19, 2018 1:26 am

Robo4900 wrote:It was cheaper and easier for European dubbing companies to import and translate French materials than to import and translate Japanese materials. Same reason as Funi getting materials from Mexico. Though Funi did still translate from Japanese, they just used translators who weren't any good, their only audio tracks were the Spanish dub and the M&E tracks, and their video master was a DigiBeta copy of Mexico's. Many of the AB-based dubs in Europe actually re-translated from French instead of getting new translations from the Japanese(Such as Big Green, or the German dub).

It is also worth noting that the Canadian English dubs were produced by AB Groupe, and did something similar to Funi for Dragon Ball and GT, aswell as the last few episodes of Z, where AB sent their video masters over to Canada for Ocean/Blue Water to put voices to, but Z reused scripts from Funi's dub(At least, it does for most of the run... It is possible those last few which used AB video masters are original translations; I've never checked to confirm this, but I doubt it), meanwhile GT was an original translation from Japanese done at Ocean/Blue Water, and DB was mostly based off of Funi's scripts, with many changes, corrections, naming convention adjustments, and several full episodes rewritten based off of translations from the original Japanese, though I suspect some of the corrections and minor alterations of Funi-based scripts were translated to English from the French dub's scripts.
One side-effect of this is that the Canadian dub of OG Dragon Ball inherits a lot of cuts from AB Groupe's master, while GT -- being later on, when AB tended to keep uncut masters -- was uncut aside from about 2 or 3 episodes which were edited to remove shots showing Goku's penis.
It also does mean that some voices in the DB dub seem to be based off of the French voices, apparently, since that's the audio they had on hand to reference.
The german dub also used the manga as a reference.

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Re: Why some dubs were based on other dubs?

Post by Robo4900 » Thu Jul 19, 2018 10:23 am

sangofe wrote:The german dub also used the manga as a reference.
As I understand it, they corrected the French>German translated dub script by referencing the manga's German translation. So any filler scenes would be purely French-based, but any manga material would likely end up being rather accurate.
However, this only really started applying later on in the OG DB run, and across Z. Early DB didn't correct based on the manga at all, and GT had no manga to correct from.
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Re: Why some dubs were based on other dubs?

Post by sangofe » Thu Jul 19, 2018 10:56 am

Robo4900 wrote:
sangofe wrote:The german dub also used the manga as a reference.
As I understand it, they corrected the French>German translated dub script by referencing the manga's German translation. So any filler scenes would be purely French-based, but any manga material would likely end up being rather accurate.
However, this only really started applying later on in the OG DB run, and across Z. Early DB didn't correct based on the manga at all, and GT had no manga to correct from.
Sounds about right.

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Re: Why some dubs were based on other dubs?

Post by DrBriefsCat » Sat Jul 21, 2018 11:18 am

Robo4900 wrote:It was cheaper and easier for European dubbing companies to import and translate French materials than to import and translate Japanese materials. Same reason as Funi getting materials from Mexico. Though Funi did still translate from Japanese, they just used translators who weren't any good, their only audio tracks were the Spanish dub and the M&E tracks, and their video master was a DigiBeta copy of Mexico's. Many of the AB-based dubs in Europe actually re-translated from French instead of getting new translations from the Japanese(Such as Big Green, or the German dub).
Actually, I heard Funimation borrowed video from Mexico because Toei was being really slow in sending over materials from Japan. As for their translations, they did have a good translator for their subtitled version on DVD but opted instead to use Toei's clunky pre-approved translations as the basis for the dub.
It is also worth noting that the Canadian English dubs were produced by AB Groupe, and did something similar to Funi for Dragon Ball and GT, aswell as the last few episodes of Z, where AB sent their video masters over to Canada for Ocean/Blue Water to put voices to, but Z reused scripts from Funi's dub(At least, it does for most of the run... It is possible those last few which used AB video masters are original translations; I've never checked to confirm this, but I doubt it), meanwhile GT was an original translation from Japanese done at Ocean/Blue Water, and DB was mostly based off of Funi's scripts, with many changes, corrections, naming convention adjustments, and several full episodes rewritten based off of translations from the original Japanese, though I suspect some of the corrections and minor alterations of Funi-based scripts were translated to English from the French dub's scripts.
One side-effect of this is that the Canadian dub of OG Dragon Ball inherits a lot of cuts from AB Groupe's master, while GT -- being later on, when AB tended to keep uncut masters -- was uncut aside from about 2 or 3 episodes which were edited to remove shots showing Goku's penis.
It also does mean that some voices in the DB dub seem to be based off of the French voices, apparently, since that's the audio they had on hand to reference.
The Canadian dubs were limited in what materials they could use, because they didn't have direct access to Toei like Funimation did. This is why the Blue Water dub of OG Dragon Ball used the French opening instead of the Japanese one (though I heard Toonami UK replaced it with their own opening).
Last edited by DrBriefsCat on Sat Jul 21, 2018 12:13 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Why some dubs were based on other dubs?

Post by TheGreatness25 » Sat Jul 21, 2018 11:42 am

Speaking of the Mexican/Latin American dub, I'm curious if there are any data books on it. I'm curious to see how they spell all of the characters'/attacks'/places'/items' names and the episode titles.

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Re: Why some dubs were based on other dubs?

Post by DrBriefsCat » Sat Jul 21, 2018 12:21 pm

TheGreatness25 wrote:Speaking of the Mexican/Latin American dub, I'm curious if there are any data books on it. I'm curious to see how they spell all of the characters'/attacks'/places'/items' names and the episode titles.
Wikipedia has the episode titles for the Mexican dub on their pages: Anexo:Episodios_de_Dragon_Ball and Anexo:Episodios de Dragon Ball Z.

I remember watching the Z dub on Telemundo back in the '90s and some names were left in Japanese (like Kaiou-sama and Saiya-jin), but Chi-Chi became "Milk" and Dr. Gero became "Dr. Maki" for some reason.

EDIT: These wikis also have quite a bit of info: Dragon Ball | Doblaje Wiki and Dragon Ball Z | Doblaje Wiki.
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Re: Why some dubs were based on other dubs?

Post by Robo4900 » Sat Jul 21, 2018 12:27 pm

DrBriefsCat wrote:Actually, I heard Funimation borrowed video from Mexico because Toei was being really slow in sending over materials from Japan. As for their translations, they did have a good translator for their subtitled version on DVD but opted instead to use Toei's clunky pre-approved translations as the basis for the dub.
There is an argument for this, though; the DVDs' subtitle translations wouldn't necessarily be ready fast enough for it to be adapted for a dub. Plus, Simmons may have ended up being too expensive to bring in as an official dub translator, but cut them a good deal for him to do it for the subs. To be honest, though, the logic behind Funi's 1994-2009 business practices still elude me.
DrBriefsCat wrote:The Canadian dubs were limited in what materials they could use, because they didn't have direct access to Toei like Funimation did. This is why the Blue Water dub of OG Dragon Ball used the French opening instead of the Japanese one (though I heard Toonami UK replaced it with their own opening).
Not true at all. They had just as much access to Toei as Funi did, it was just cheaper, faster, and easier to get materials from France, because that's where AB Groupe are based.
The only reason for them to have potentially not had access to Toei out of anything but choice due to convenience and cost would be if it was an unlicensed production.
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Re: Why some dubs were based on other dubs?

Post by jjgp1112 » Sat Jul 21, 2018 12:53 pm

DrBriefsCat wrote:
Robo4900 wrote:It was cheaper and easier for European dubbing companies to import and translate French materials than to import and translate Japanese materials. Same reason as Funi getting materials from Mexico. Though Funi did still translate from Japanese, they just used translators who weren't any good, their only audio tracks were the Spanish dub and the M&E tracks, and their video master was a DigiBeta copy of Mexico's. Many of the AB-based dubs in Europe actually re-translated from French instead of getting new translations from the Japanese(Such as Big Green, or the German dub).
Actually, I heard Funimation borrowed video from Mexico because Toei was being really slow in sending over materials from Japan. As for their translations, they did have a good translator for their subtitled version on DVD but opted instead to use Toei's clunky pre-approved translations as the basis for the dub.
The subtitled DVDs that FUNimation released for the first 3 movies was all Pioneer's doing. They had their own translators and stuff, which was a big reason those 3 movies turned out as good as they did. When FUNimation started releasing the subtitled DVDs for the show in 2000, that was when the quality of the dub scripts started to make a noticeable improvement, although they continued to make some needless changes. So I have to imagine they simply used Simmons' translations from the Cell saga onward. Especially considering after the Cell saga the episodes came out on DVD before airing on TV.
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Re: Why some dubs were based on other dubs?

Post by TheGreatness25 » Sat Jul 21, 2018 12:59 pm

DrBriefsCat wrote:
TheGreatness25 wrote:Speaking of the Mexican/Latin American dub, I'm curious if there are any data books on it. I'm curious to see how they spell all of the characters'/attacks'/places'/items' names and the episode titles.
Wikipedia has the episode titles for the Mexican dub on their pages: Anexo:Episodios_de_Dragon_Ball and Anexo:Episodios de Dragon Ball Z.

I remember watching the Z dub on Telemundo back in the '90s and some names were left in Japanese (like Kaiou-sama and Saiya-jin), but Chi-Chi became "Milk" and Dr. Gero became "Dr. Maki" for some reason.

EDIT: These wikis also have quite a bit of info: Dragon Ball | Doblaje Wiki and Dragon Ball Z | Doblaje Wiki.

Thank you!

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Re: Why some dubs were based on other dubs?

Post by Robo4900 » Sat Jul 21, 2018 1:04 pm

jjgp1112 wrote:The subtitled DVDs that FUNimation released for the first 3 movies was all Pioneer's doing. They had their own translators and stuff, which was a big reason those 3 movies turned out as good as they did.
Yep, this is completely true.
However, it is worth noting that actually, the Saban dub was based on rather good translations, they just deliberately made a ton of changes and adaptations to fit the Barry Watson vision of what a Dragon Ball series should be.
jjgp1112 wrote:When FUNimation started releasing the subtitled DVDs for the show in 2000, that was when the quality of the dub scripts started to make a noticeable improvement, although they continued to make some needless changes. So I have to imagine they simply used Simmons' translations from the Cell saga onward. Especially considering after the Cell saga the episodes came out on DVD before airing on TV.
No, from what I've observed, this is definitely not the case.
If you compare the show to the subtitles from Simmons, it's very clear if you go from Saban's season 2 to in-house Funi season 3 that the scripts are actually translated a lot worse, and then put under the same kind of adaptational changes you saw in the first two seasons, resulting in the scripts being even worse than before, with the grain of truth the whole weird thing grew out of no longer actually being present due to how bad the translations had become. The "Remastered" dub cleaned this up a bit, but not really much; the changes were mostly just making certain lines not be as cheesy or poorly-written, the accuracy remains screwed.
Simmons' translations were almost certainly not used for the OG Funi dub, only for the DVD subtitles.
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Re: Why some dubs were based on other dubs?

Post by jjgp1112 » Sat Jul 21, 2018 1:15 pm

Robo4900 wrote:
jjgp1112 wrote:The subtitled DVDs that FUNimation released for the first 3 movies was all Pioneer's doing. They had their own translators and stuff, which was a big reason those 3 movies turned out as good as they did.
Yep, this is completely true.
However, it is worth noting that actually, the Saban dub was based on rather good translations, they just deliberately made a ton of changes and adaptations to fit the Barry Watson vision of what a Dragon Ball series should be.
jjgp1112 wrote:When FUNimation started releasing the subtitled DVDs for the show in 2000, that was when the quality of the dub scripts started to make a noticeable improvement, although they continued to make some needless changes. So I have to imagine they simply used Simmons' translations from the Cell saga onward. Especially considering after the Cell saga the episodes came out on DVD before airing on TV.
No, from what I've observed, this is definitely not the case.
If you compare the show to the subtitles from Simmons, it's very clear if you go from Saban's season 2 to in-house Funi season 3 that the scripts are actually translated a lot worse, and then put under the same kind of adaptational changes you saw in the first two seasons, resulting in the scripts being even worse than before, with the grain of truth the whole weird thing grew out of no longer actually being present due to how bad the translations had become. The "Remastered" dub cleaned this up a bit, but not really much; the changes were mostly just making certain lines not be as cheesy or poorly-written, the accuracy remains screwed.
Simmons' translations were almost certainly not used for the OG Funi dub, only for the DVD subtitles.
It wouldn't really make sense for Funimation to not use Simmons' translations for the Japanese script if they were already using him for the subtitles. The improvement in the scripts I'm referring to starts around the Cell saga, which was also when they started releasing the bilingual DVDs and I imagine the inaccuracy of the redubs was more out of laziness than a lack of accurate scripts available. After all, their redubs of Movies 1 and 2 recycled the Pioneer scripts, and even the Ultimate Uncut dub is mostly the "Ocean" scripts but with the censorship and egregious changes fixed.
Yamcha: Do you remember the spell to release him - do you know all the words?
Bulma: Of course! I'm not gonna pull a Frieza and screw it up!
Master Roshi: Bulma, I think Frieza failed because he wore too many clothes!
Cold World (Fanfic)
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Re: Why some dubs were based on other dubs?

Post by Robo4900 » Sat Jul 21, 2018 1:20 pm

jjgp1112 wrote:It wouldn't really make sense for Funimation to not use Simmons' translations for the Japanese script if they were already using him for the subtitles. The improvement in the scripts I'm referring to starts around the Cell saga, which was also when they started releasing the bilingual DVDs and I imagine the inaccuracy of the redubs was more out of laziness than a lack of accurate scripts available. After all, their redubs of Movies 1 and 2 recycled the Pioneer scripts, and even the Ultimate Uncut dub is mostly the "Ocean" scripts but with the censorship and egregious changes fixed.
Except the bilingual DVDs started coming out the moment Funimation brought things in-house; the very first "Ginyu Saga" DVD, "Ginyu Assault" got some initial big praise from the hardcore fandom for being the first bilingual DVD of the series.

And yes, it absolutely doesn't make sense for Funi to have not used Simmons' translations... And yet, if you give it a watch, I think it's pretty clear they didn't, especially if you watch the Burdock special. The script accuracy took a massive dive after season 2, Chris Sabat talked about the script translations they were using being terrible in his Geekdom interview... I think it's pretty certain Simmons' translations were not used.

(Side-note to anyone who hasn't seen Sabat's interview on Geekdom: It's amazing, and super-interesting, and Sabat's voice is like chocolate cake for your ears. Seriously, give this thing a listen, you won't regret it!)
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Re: Why some dubs were based on other dubs?

Post by VegettoEX » Sat Jul 21, 2018 1:27 pm

Robo4900 wrote:Except the bilingual DVDs started coming out the moment Funimation brought things in-house; the very first "Ginyu Saga" DVD, "Ginyu Assault" got some initial big praise from the hardcore fandom for being the first bilingual DVD of the series.
Not quite. The DVDs started coming out later in 2000, while the in-house dub of "season three" was already going on VHS early/mid-1999 and aired on Cartoon Network later that fall (and this is also after Sleeping Princess in Devil's Castle came out in late 1998).
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