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Sakura Con - Saturday - Tristan
MacAvery
 "I call this
the `defending your life panel,' " said actor Tristan MacAvery when he
faced a Saturday afternoon room full of fans. People at Sakura Con were
not hesitant to say that they disliked dubs, and MacAvery agreed - to a
point. "It is very easy to screw up a dub. Bad dubs suck," he said. MacAvery
spent an hour showing fans how he decides what to put into the scripts
of anime he has directed. He admitted that some lines in a dub are not
in the original Japanese script.
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 If you think
that dubs take some of the Japanese flavor out of anime, MacAvery agrees.
"You are going to have to Americanize it a little because there are some
things these dumb Yankees can't get," he said. That's why references to
well-known Japanese TV shows and characters get turned into references
to well-known American TV shows and characters, although MacAvery said
that kind of cleverness can get overused. |
 A direct translation
is dull, MacAvery said. "It's our job to figure out the intricacies of
the Japanese original. English is clumsy. It's made up of German-based
words with Latin grammar. In Japanese, you can express an amazing amount
of information in three lip flaps." Still, as a writer, MacAvery wants
to make sure a story is told, which is why his rewrites of anime translations
try to include a plot - even if there was no plot in the original. |
 You still
don't like dubs? "If the anime is sacred and original, then learn Japanese
and do it right," suggests MacAvery. |
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