One of the odd things about this series is the way Kaoru and Aoi act in the English dub. Both of them talk in a very formal manner. Their speaking is slow and even, and they never use contractions. (Their speach is a bit like that of the character Data in Star Trek.) At first I thought this was due to the difficulty of matching the dub to the original mouth movements. However, their delivery seems stiff even when the character speaking isn’t onscreen.<\/p>\n
Now I have a new theory: I think they speak this way in an attempt to re-create the very formal speaking style of the characters. I’m betting that due to their traditionalist upbringing, Kaoru and Aoi have strong accents that I could hear if I had Japanese ears. <\/p>\n
Another interesting note is that unlike most dubs, they preserved a great many of the honorifics. Even in English Kaoru and Aoi call each other Kaoru-sama and Aoi-chan. However, they call Miyabi “Miss Miyabi”, a translation of Miyabi-san. In turn, Miyabi calls them “Sir Kaoru” and “Lady Aoi” instead of Kaoru-dono and Aoi-sama. I can’t tell why some honorifics were translated and some were preserved. Sempai (sp?) is translated for certain combinations of characters and not for others. At least it’s consistant throughout, though.<\/p>\n
For Tina’s character, they simulated the effect of her American accent by having her speak in a southern (Dixie) accent for the dub. The accent is a bit heavy-handed, and the way it’s played it makes her sound a bit unsophisticated, which might be how an American accent would sound to people in upper-class Japan. <\/p>\n
Tina also leaves off honorifics entirely. I checked the subtitles and listened as well as I could to the Japanese voices, and I’m pretty sure she does indeed leave off honorifics, at least sometimes. This is odd. I didn’t know you could do that. I thought one of the challenges facing foreigners was that you couldn’t refer to someone without knowing what honorific you needed. Perhaps this is only a problem if you don’t know their name. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the odd things about this series is the way Kaoru and Aoi act in the English dub. Both of them talk in a very formal manner. Their speaking is slow and even, and they never use contractions. (Their speach is a bit like that of the character Data in Star Trek.) At first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anime"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}