Current Events > Why are Japanese to English translations in voice acting so awful

(+) Yeah! (+)

Noticed this while playing resident evil 5

And its the same for other Japanese games like metal gear solid

And anime

Like the voice acting is over exaggerated and the lines are so cheesy
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What do you meant by Japanese to English translations in voice acting? Do you mean the voice acting is so bad or the translations themselves are so bad?

RE5? I don't remember anything too awful
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Death Note has a fantastic English Dub.
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Uh, RE5 only has an English dub. Japanese RE5 is in English too
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gna647 posted...

Noticed this while playing resident evil 5

And its the same for other Japanese games like metal gear solid

And anime

Like the voice acting is over exaggerated and the lines are so cheesy

acting as if RE5 and MGS aren't cheesy at their core
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Hmmm...and here I thought MGS was one of the good ones.
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Some of them are actually quite decent. But a lot of the times, this is because the translations given by the company don't adequately convey the full context of the line, meaning the delivery is tonally off both in the writing and in the vocal performance. If the translation is commissioned and bought by the localizing company you can run into situations where the Japanese people doing the translating don't realize that their translation is missing context. Other times the translations are too literal (this can happen on both sides of the pond). These are errors that have to be caught by localization staff, and which are often missed because of strict time constraints. Worse still, some companies will legally prevent localization companies from revising or editing their translated script and known errors are allowed to remain in the script because no one can remove them.

On the localization side, the process of preparing a translated script is rarely just straight translation, but trying to maintain a sense of voice as well. The sheer volume of decisions a localization team has to grapple with can be paralyzing, and some times they cheat and look for recognizable approximations that audiences can easily digest, even if they are large departures from the character as it was originally written. Barrett's representation as a big scary black man with shitty English is an example of this. He may not have used elevated speech like Sephiroth, but he certainly wasn't casually throwing swear words everywhere, being verbally threatening, and leaning heavily into ethnic slang. In this example, the FFVII localization team effectively has used our Western cultural idea of the big scary black man as narrative shorthand for Barrett's characterization.
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Because the translations teams and actors are often hired cheap.

Sometimes literally pulling people off the street or some secretary, or relative.
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hollow_shrine posted...

These are errors

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