...wha?

[elwen]

I just caught a snippet of a drama on TV. It was mostly in Mandarin, with Chinese subtitles. Except there was one guy who spoke Japanese. And occasionally, possibly corresponding to that guy's lines, there were Korean subtitles. o_O;;

I mean, KTSF (channel 26) does regularly air shows in all three of those languages . . . but usually not all at once. @_@

Comments

[ling84.livejournal.com]

I guess there's two possibilities - either they're putting in different languages for the ethnic flair, or they're just being lazy with their dubbing (not likely since the line would just be outright *gone* if that were the case).

As for the ethnic flair part, I followed a martial arts drama that was in Chinese but had some "Japanese" characters in it, and it was just really unnerving when they spoke perfect Chinese. So I think it's better when they're actually speaking what they're supposed to.

It seems to me that Chinese audiences are pretty interested in watching Korean / Japanese dramas right now, or at least things involving Korean / Japanese characters. A lot of the dramas shown on KTSF now are actually cross-dubs from Korean to Chinese, or Japanese to Chinese. You can usually tell when things are cross-dubs if most of the sound effects are missing. :)

[ctrl-a.livejournal.com]

But how is having one guy speak Japanese with Korean subtitles, neither of which the presumably Chinese viewer understands, helpful in any way?

[ling84.livejournal.com]

The most probable scenario, in my mind, was that the Chinese dubbers didn't know what to do with that one line and decided to ignore it. It was probably in the script in Japanese, but they only hired a Korean-to-Chinese translator for the dub. (Probably, budget limitations prevented them from hiring a Japanese translator for this single line.)

I guess they just left the original Korean subs in because they either couldn't get their hands on the original sub-less video, or they were unable to remove it themselves (budget, again).

Wow. It sounds like they were suffering from all the problems that plague US dubs of anime, too. Were the sound effects also egregious or just about absent (ie, horses passing by in absolute silence)?