Talk:B.B.B.F.F./International versions/@comment-4400895-20140319015745/@comment-5288784-20140320010902

Top-tier, are the dubs, that for me have generally proven reliably good over the time. In order of appearing on this page those are: German, French, Italian, Latin American Spanish, Polish, and Japanese. I might also consider including Brazilian Portuguese (possibly?), Russian (especially Russian), and Finnish (I don't know - just kinda like how it sounds).

That doesn't say the other dubbings are necessarily bad (even though some of them are), they just aren't... special in a way.

Well, I don't know Japanese at all (maybe besides few words), but I suppose you might be right about it requiring more syllables to convey the meaning - this might be in large part due to much simpler phonology. Can you even imagine how many kana-like characters Indo-European languages would require, if we had something like that? One thing for sure - it would be much, much, more than three dozen. Anyway, I don't care much, that they don't rhyme - but I don't think, there isn't a good way to loosen the translation enough to preserve it.

As a bilingual person, I can see how far the translators can sometimes go - not just in songs, but also in adding language-based humor, elements of pop-culture, and the like. Was there really no possible way to keep the rhythm? They did a pretty good job on those two-syllables sequences from Mane 6 towards the end of At the Gala. I love that kind of creativity. It really shows how much the translators care.

I know how hard the localization can be. I'm actually working on my secret localization project - and while it was sometimes fun, especially at first, I sometimes struggled near the end thinking "oh my, how much more's left?". They did fine job for this to sound okay to say the least, but as they are professionals, I would expect more from them.

The other two reasons are rather obvious - scene cutting and not dubbing songs. The first argument I'll concede, when (and if) the full uncut DVDs (or some alike) is released. Sorry, I consider a fail of specific dubbing anything, that was that country's fault, regardless if it was dubbing studio, TV channel, or something else. Some factors diminish the weight of this fail (it's not censorship, time constraints, not that really important, etc.), but still... the other dubbing, that cuts parts of episodes is Turkish, and that comparison, while perhaps not entirely fair, acts self-consciously as a deterrent to me.

Not dubbing songs... well, that shows how short-sighted were the producers when picking, and/or negotiating actors (and don't even try to tell me, that they were hard to translate or sing - they really weren't, and fans have proven that long before official dubbing - at least with WWU). I've heard, that Japanese has such tradition, that all singing is handled out by speaking actors, so they never use singing VAs. It's a noble idea that contributes to realism, but I don't care about it. Right now all I can hear, or better said, what I can't hear is more obvious to me, than possible slight differences in voices. And it's quite possible to pick a singing VA, that the viewers will never find out, if it's not credited and they don't ask directly (see: Polish Celestia - I swear she sounded exactly like Jędrzejewska).

Well, that's one lengthy comment.