The dub script is an often overlooked part of an English dub, in that it has much more influence over whether or not a dub sounds good than most fans give it credit for. The fact that it didn’t is a very big strike against it in my eyes. Reading the word in the subtitles was bad enough, but actually hearing an English-speaking Yuuya say the word out loud just drives home what a terrible idea this is.įor the rest of this post, I’ll do my best to review the rest of the dub, but the truth is that I went into this dub with only one major criterion: replace “Eishi” with an English word. This is not a small mistake – Yuuya’s attitude towards the Japanese is at the very heart of the show, and now it is completely incomprehensible. How can anybody take seriously a show in which the lead character – an American, in the US army, assigned to a base located in America in which English is the common language, and whose defining characteristic is a hatred of anything Japanese – refers to his OWN JOB – a job invented by the Americans – with a Japanese word? It doesn’t make any sense at all. This is, without question, the worst decision they could have made, and it breaks the show completely. The English dub, unfortunately, has a fatal flaw: it continues to use the Japanese words “Eishi” and “Chobi” in dialogue.
This was by far the worst aspect of the Crunchyroll subtitles, and my greatest hope was that the Sentai release would fix it. However, the worst is that, just like the Crunchyroll subtitles, the Sentai subtitles retain the Japanese words “Eishi” and “Chobi” rather than translating them. I seem to recall Ibrahim Dogulu’s name spelled three different ways in the Crunchyroll subs, but those instances have been changed to the correct spelling. One thing that has changed is that names are much more standardized. The name “Shiranui Second” is still rendered as “Shiranui Type 2”.
These are fairly common translations for those ranks in anime (you can see them in Gundam, for instance), although they don’t strictly correlate with actual US Army ranks. The rank of 少尉 is translated as “Ensign”, and 中尉 as “Lieutenant”. Many of the translation choices remain the same. I didn’t do a side-by-side comparison, but to my eye they look like a slightly cleaned-up version of the Crunchyroll subtitles. So, I went into this dub with low expectations, but with the hope that it would exceed them – not unlike how I went into the anime adaptation itself, actually.īefore getting into the dub, let’s look at the subtitles a little. I’ve heard they’ve improved since then, but the Sentai releases that I’ve bought in the past year are still in my backlog so I haven’t heard them yet. But everything I heard from Sentai was just awful, and the fact that many of the actors were capable of much better only seemed to make the experience even worse. I’ve heard some great dubs back in the ADV days – some clunkers too, naturally, but I know this is a talent pool capable of greatness. I haven’t listened to a Sentai dub in a while, because quite frankly, the ones I heard a few years ago were absolutely terrible. Should we talk about the Sentai release? Let’s talk about the Sentai release.
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