(Apology in advance for how long-winded this is)
I’m not entirely sure the best way to word the question, I’m sure it sounds bizarre; it came up for me while I was watching the Japanese dub for The Boys (spoilers ahead if you plan on watching and aren’t up to date).
If you don’t plan on watching it, and just want to see what dialogue I’m referring to, it’s in Season 3, Episode 2 around 35:50 into the episode. In the English closed captions, Homelander is saying:
“[exhales] You give and you give… [stammering] You give your whole f*cking life, and what happens? People just tear you down.”
Near the start, he’s sort of exasperated at the point where he’s saying “You give and you give…”, and then after stammering he raises his voice and starts getting more agitated as he says “You give your whole f*cking life”.
In the Japanese dub, he gets a bit more animated / audibly upset than he does with the English audio, but I’m confused as to why he starts shouting at the point in the sentence that he does because it feels sort of arbitrary. I believe the Japanese dialogue is:
「人々に自分なー [this is where he starts shouting] 人生の全てを差し出し続けて！結局人は引き裂いてくる。」
(I might be a little off, I’m still not great at listening)
I can’t tell if he says な or のは before trailing off and beginning to shout. It might not even be part of a word and could just be like an angry grunt or whatever. The Japanese subtitles for this dialogue says:
「自分は与え続けているのにその見返りは？人々に引き裂かれるだけ」
(While that’s effectively the same meaning, I know it isn’t what he’s saying out loud word-for-word at the very least.)
So… why does he start shouting right there in the sentence? Is it because the writers for the Japanese dub’s VAs just wanted to match the “mouth flap” of Homelander, and to do that it required him getting angrier / louder at that point of his sentence in order to fit? Or is there a specific reason why someone might start shouting at that point in the sentence, rather than further along? Like, getting more agitated during the first pause and then shouting after?
Because Japanese sentence structure is so different to English, it seems sort of confusing to me to figure out what point in a sentence you’d want to emphasize if you’re upset with your tone (and not just by tacking something like よ onto the end of the sentence).
Like, if you’re talking in English to someone and becoming angrier, you might be like “every time this happens, *YOU* [starting to shout] *BLAH BLAH BLAH*”. And that makes sense to me, because it’s like, as you’re beginning to talk about the established topic (thing that person you’re upset with does), you get more and more fed up as you think about it more and vocalize it.
But with Japanese, where the verb can be at the end of the sentence, and it isn’t necessarily obvious (at least not to me) what you’re trying to say until the thought is complete, is it confusing for a native Japanese speaker to have someone start shouting at them before finding out what the sentence’s point is? Does that even happen?
Or do people just sort of know the gist of the line before the sentence ends from context? I don’t know that with this particular Homelander monologue it’s obvious what he’s trying to say initially, but maybe in real life the context clues are more clear because if someone’s upset with you there’s likely a history behind it.
In this particular instance with Homelander, in English he gets madder and louder as he’s saying “you give your whole f*cking life”, but in Japanese at the point where he begins shouting all he’s said is like “your whole life” and the sentence ends with like, “keep giving”. But he’s already begun shouting before he’s expressed that idea. Is that just because it’s dubbed? Or is this something that happens in (loud) arguments in Japanese?
I’m sorry for the rambling. Really the part I was curious about was how you’d know where it made sense to begin shouting if it was in the middle of a sentence that you hadn’t said a verb for yet, rather than a pause between sentences. If I had to take a guess, an answer I’d get to this would just be something like:
“yeah, they probably changed his tone at that part of the sentence to better match his facial expression for the dub, but in a real argument you don’t have a sort of “plan” as to when you start shouting, but it just sort of happens naturally, like in English”.
Might be a dumb question, might not have a good answer, but I thought I’d ask. I’m also not even sure that arguments or confrontations tend to be this animated in natural Japanese in daily life. I’ve really only ever heard people shouting like this in anime and (fantasy/drama) tv shows, but not really in the limited amount of “reality” Japanese TV I’ve seen.
I’d be interested to see what other people think. If you read all of that, I appreciate you <3
7 comments
This is actually an interesting question and i hope somebody answers it
Why not just watch a real-life Japanese argument in action as a sample?
https://youtu.be/z-0b-EtMAv8
In the USA, some people have basically zero threshold to start shouting, while others are going to almost never do so.
Also people will have a bad day and shout a lot, but not shout normally.
IDK how this helps. But I was thinking, the rules are complicated here in the USA. Since Japan is at least as complicated, I think it will be a very difficult answer.
Think of movie/ tv show dubs as anime or theatre. It’s done for dramatic effect and the shouting would begin in line with whatever they want to emphasise most.
Often that coincides with where a 、would naturally be. Or a comma in english, if you will.
As an example: 命ってそんな軽いもんじゃねんだよ。
命って. . . (Pause) //そんな軽いもんじゃねぇんだよ//
The phrase between the slashes would be shouted, made some vowel modifications for how it would sound.
There are some similarities in real arguments but it varies from person to person, subject matter, emotions and people involved.
It’s really hard to describe, unfortunately 😅 if you have specific scenarios, I’ll try to answer them to the best of my experience
Hope this helped
Don’t shout in any language during an argument. Makes the other person lose all respect for you. Shouting should be used in emergencies, to be heard. During an argument however, it has 1 purpose which is to drown out, overpower, or diminish what the other person is saying. If you know you are right, then you shouldn’t need to shout. If the other person won’t listen, Shouting ain’t gonna fix that. If you know you’re wrong, then wtf are you doing?
I don’t believe I have a proper answer from a linguistic perspective. But I have some experience as an ADR engineer for international dubs, and from what I’ve seen in that field, mouth flaps and the general feel of the scene is the most important. Obviously you need a good script and a director who knows what he’s doing, but decisions in dubbing almost always follow the rules of best sync with the image while still sounding as natural as possible.
It’s quite likely that in this specific case, they looked at the original line, gave it a few tries to see what matched best, recorded a few takes, and ultimately chose the one with an early split purely out of a gut feeling. At least that’s how we used to do things with my fellow audio staff.
That being said, when it comes to the Japanese language, I find that angry outbursts are far more common in media than progressive anger. I have no basis to say this, just my own experience with media, but I find that it’s quite common for angry characters to shout at a surprising moment and sort of “explode” in anger, rather than having a dramatic build up where they get progressively angrier until they’re shouting. So I’d say the logic followed is quite simple: Start shouting whenever you want the character to emphasize a specific part of the sentence, and where it’ll feel natural to split the sentence in the first place.
So they probably start shouting at least between two clauses of a sentence, and they also probably do it at the most important moment, as well as more suddenly than English actors, while making sure lip syncing looks acceptable.
I don’t think Japanese dubbing is good quality, and certainty not a good language model for you to learn. I find the voices are often too streamlined into deep male voices and squeaky female voices. Homegrown anime is much better, generally. (Though tv dramas are possibly worse, I’ve seen some truly atrocious acting)