For DB, I believe AB Groupe had Blue Water use translated French scripts to save money. The end result was... Actually still better than Funimation, but the censorship and the rather meh voices in Blue Water's DB effort sort of cancel that out.
For the three movies under Pioneer, Ocean had their own translations were were pretty great. They kind of did the same for Blue Water's excellent GT dub, and I think we can expect something similar to the GT and Pioneer scripts in terms of translation style. And to me, that sounds awesome.
Maybe I have slightly exaggerated the extent of how bad Funimation's Z dub scripts were, but seriously, they were not good. At best, they were below average. At best. Most of the time, they were pretty crap.
Thing is, Kai is always billed as being a pillar of accuracy, and the most true to the Japanese version experience you can have...
But the scripts are mostly just the Z dub scripts with some changes to make the dialogue flow better, really. Some new lines are in there, and those lines are usually pretty decent, but they also add random fluff just like they used to... The voice acting is a huge improvement, but I'm not a fan of Funimation's casting and direction, so I'm not really the best one to ask about that. Ultimately, I think Kai is pretty good, but that's about it.
Anyway, the thing is, for me, Ocean Kai will likely end up trumping everything else. The Ocean voices, better scripting, and neither the plagiarised Yamamoto score or the haphazard Kikuchi replacement score will be involved.
Yep. I am biased towards the Ocean dub. It's the version I grew up with, and to me, the Ocean voices will always be how these characters are supposed to sound. Trying to deny this would be foolish. But ultimately, Ocean's prior work has been flawed in various ways, many of which should be remedied somewhat in this version; the most notable of these is definitely the dialogue, though. The Ocean crew made some of the clunkiest, awful dialogue from the original actually not sound too bad, so I look forward to seeing what they do with actually good dialogue.Dbzfan94 wrote:Well he's also blatantly admitted his bias for the Ocean dub too.
But really, even if Ocean Kai was going to be the same thing as the Saban dub was to Z, I wouldn't be bothered by that at all. The Ocean crew doing more Dragon Ball will always be a big win for me.
The thing is, the lip flaps things ends up as a pretty flimsy excuse when you examine it more closely, and ultimately a lot of the time, they don't retain the meaning.Dbzfan94 wrote:If you mean Kai plus some of the later Z dub stuff then yeah, but that's besides the point. He pointed out multiple examples where the dialogue was more or less the same in Z to Kai but much longer than the Japanese while still retaining the meaning. Which goes back to what I said about lip flaps.
Here are some detailed ramblings about this:
[spoiler]In Steve Simmons' subs, Ox-King says "Chichi! Buck up!" or "Chichi! Steady!" depending on whether you're watching Z or Kai's subs.
In Funimation's Kai dub, he says "Uh oh, Chi-Chi! Uh, get the smelling salts, Krillin."
There's no need to add that extra fluff. You could easily go "Uh oh, Chi-Chi! Pull yourself together, Chi-Chi!" or something else to that effect.
But, the most damning thing of all is that Ox-King's line there is said while he's off-screen; no mouths are actually visible, so there's no mouth flaps to worry about. So, there was no need to add the smelling salts line, it's just unnecessary fluff.
In Steve Simmons' Kai subs, Bulma says "Hey, I'm finally done! You've got some nerve, kicking back and sleeping at a time like this! You there, Old Man Turtle, stand up.", and Roshi replies with "O-Old Man Turtle?"
In Funimation Kai, Bulma says "Hey Guys! Hop to, I think I got it working! Listen! I've been up all night, and I'm a little bit irritable right now. You do not want to get on my bad side this morning! Now then, let's try this again. Hop to, guys!" and then Roshi says "Uhh... hop where?"
So, in the Japanese, Bulma calls Roshi a jokingly insulting term about his age, and he's a little taken aback by it. Bulma is clearly very angry at them for sleeping, and wants them to see what she's done.
In the Funimation version, Bulma tells them to "Hop to", with no reference to Roshi's age, and in fact, there are no sarcastic jabs at all, with Bulma instead spending the entire line complaining at them about her mood, and how they shouldn't get on her bad side, with no in-dialogue reference to the fact she's specifically annoyed at the fact they're sleeping. On one hand, this could be left out of the dialogue to be implied in the visuals, but if the problem is that Funimation don't have enough dialogue to work with to fit the mouth flaps, then why would they remove an actual part of the original dialogue? That would just make their job harder.
Overall, this dialogue is extended out quite a bit, but there's really no need for it to be that long; The "You do not want to get on my bad side this morning!" part was added to a shot of Turtle in which Bulma wasn't speaking in the Japanese version. If you remove that line, you don't lose anything that was in the Japanese version, so it's entirely an added fluff line that Funimation put together for no reason. The rest of the line itself could have fairly easily been changed to fit closer to the Japanese.
Perhaps something more to the effect of "Hey guys! Hop to, I think I got it working! Hey! You guys have got some nerve to be sleeping at a time like this! Now then, stand up old-timer."
Then Roshi can reply with "O- old timer?"
Not the finest piece of writing you'll ever read there, but it fits the mouth flaps(Note I used the same number of syllables as Funi Kai, minus their added "Bad side this morning" bit), guts Funimation's added fluff, and gets more of what the Japanese dialogue's intent was across, and as a bonus it's not hugely clunky either.
In Steve Simmons' Kai subs, Bulma says "You haven't brought me to this godforsaken place in order to do something pervy with me, right? H-Hey!"
In Funimation's Kai dub, Bulma says "Hey! If you've brought me all the way out here just to try something funny, you should know I've been taking Judo since I was 9 years old. Get me? Don't go! It was a joke!"
Now, granted, the point about the mouth flaps not fitting does kind of work here, but in addition to some justified padding, they also changed the meaning of the line. The "It was a joke" part was never in the Japanese version, and in Funimation's version, Bulma comes across as a lot more aggressive than the Japanese version. And then she says "It was a joke", which is weird given how angry she sounded... And it's not an especially funny joke either, so it's just a really weird piece of dialogue.
Watching the clip myself, it looks like they could have quite easily fit something closer to the Japanese dialogue here by just slowing her speech a little, and using bigger words.
Something to the effect of "Hey! You haven't brought me all the way out here to this godforsaken wasteland in order to do something indecent to me, have you? W-wait stop!" would fit just fine, and get something much closer to the original meaning. And if that doesn't fit the lip-flaps, it'd be very easy to remove some redundant stuff("All the way out here", "Godforsaken", "In order"), or add extra stuff("Godforsaken wasteland in the middle of no-where", perhaps?). Again, not the most natural dialogue on the planet, but I'm not a professional writer or anything.
Here's the thing, though; the English language is pretty flexible in that you can quite easily add or remove padding to fit specific syllable or word requirements, so there should be very few cases where you need to actually add or remove anything from the original Japanese dialogue. Funimation do this all the time, and as I've just demonstrated, they often do it unnecessarily to add detail and jokes that were never in the Japanese version. There's no reason to do this, especially when the whole draw of Kai is accuracy.
To quote Sean Schemmel himself, in a remark he was using to disparage Ocean's version of Kai, "We are giving you the purest DBZ experience possible, and if you don't like that, then you don't like DBZ."
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