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The International Dub Thread

RetroPokeFan

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This thread is a place to talk about any of the International Dubs that Pokémon has had besides the English dub. You can talk about any like the French dub, the Polish dub, the Spanish dub, basically dubs from around the world that have kept fans entertained for generations.

Feel free to give your thought on anything like Ash's voice in a different country or the dubbing studios.

Be fair now and enjoy.
 
The latin american dub of the last episodes of XYZ will premiere on May. Hopefully Steven keeps his season 18 voice, which was the same as his season 6 voice!

On different news, it seems that the latin american dub of Sun & Moon was the second one to premiere in the world, as it' premiering concutrrently with the english dub on Disney XD USA, via the SAP option. However, most latin american fans don't have access to it logically, we are strucked with a 5 second clip for who knows how long.
 
The Brazilian dub of the Pokémon anime faced some major changes in the past few months.

If I'm not mistaken, our dub was the only one besides the original Japanese version to have Ash voiced by the same person from day one up to the nineteenth season. There was one time in which Fábio Lucindo wasn't cast to voice Ash, and it was on Jirachi: Wish Maker, but If I recall correctly the movie was re-dubbed before its premiere on Cartoon Network, and Lucindo provided the voice of Ash in the final version.

Charles Emmanuel voices Ash now. His voice is okay, but it takes a little while to get used to, especially when you have been hearing Lucindo's voice for so long. Lucindo stopped voicing Ash because he moved to Portugal, and The Pokémon Company International used this opportunity to move the dub from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro, replacing all the voice actors in the process.

It was a little weird hearing Ash with another voice, but hearing Jessie and James' new voices was sad. Jessie and James had been brilliantly voiced by Isabel Cristina de Sá and Márcio Araújo, respectively, since day one as well. They owned the characters, they were terrific at their jobs, and they loved the characters they played. Isabel even commented that she wasn't satisfied with Jessie's role in the Best Wishes series, much like Jessie's original voice actress.

We had online petitions, but you guys know how successful these things are. Pokémon is a product, TPCi has to make money out of it, and changing studios saved the company some money as they hired more affordable voice actors (not saying the new voice actors are bad, they just don't have 15+ years of experience to ask for fatter paychecks).

Brazilians fans are currently asking themselves if Pokémon will move to Disney XD. That's up in the air, but Cartoon Network BR treats Pokémon a little better than its parent channel in the US. Voice actors for the Sun & Moon series have been cast already, but I don't know if dubbing has started yet.
 
The Korean dub is both good and bad. Good because they save nearly all the BGMs from the Japanese version (except for the OP and ED). Bad because some of the voice acting sucks. The dub here has been notorious for recycling voice actors (such as Dawn and Serena sharing a voice actress), and sometimes they can't make up their mind on how they were going to use honorifics. Korean, like Japanese, has separate forms of words when addressing a stranger/someone older/for the sake of being polite or showing respect/etc. However, when they dubbed Clemont, they couldn't make up their mind on how they wanted to have him talk to Ash. So the early episodes of XY aired with him mixing in the casual "yo, buddy" language with the "sir, may I" language... which ended up being a major target of criticism. I don't know if they fixed it during the series, but seeing how nobody's really talking about it I guess either people are ignoring it or they did fix it in one way.
 
Anyone hear the Korean opening for Sun and Moon? Look it up on Youtube. It sounds pretty cool honestly

The official Korean Pokémon YouTube channel uploaded it earlier this month. Interestingly, previous Korean openings used Japanese opening footage, but this one didn't use any.


On the other hand, the Thai dub continues to do whatever it's doing... (namely using their one-song-a-year budget to get a song that doesn't really fit the animation)
 
All non-Marvista Pokemon movies have been updated to Google Play Mexico, with their Latin American dub, this means two things:

1)Movie 19's dub is finally available!

but more importantly...

2)The first 3 movies have been finally taken out of the vault! They were nowhere to be seen during the last 8-9 years. No TV airings, DVDs or anything. So far there haven't been any reports of changes to their original versions.
 
Gerardo Vásque, Meowth's Spanish (Latin American) dub voice always bothered me, sounds like a nasely annoying meanie kids voice, not sure how to describe, sounds so strange and ugly

My favorites have to be Diana Perez (who voices Jessie) and José Antonio Macías (who voices James)

(did watched a couple of episodes in 2006 when I visited relatives in Mexico)

I love watching anime in Spanish (Latin American), I don't like much the Iberian accent
 
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Team Rocket kept their original personalities intact for the BW series in the Latin American dub.

Pros: It worked perfectly and it was a magical experience. They even nicknamed Dr. Zager and did motto variations.
Cons: Higher-ups didn't like it, demanded no script changes from season 16 onwards. Latin American dub is dead now.
 
Gerardo Vásque, Meowth's Spanish (Latin American) dub voice always bothered me, sounds like a nasely annoying meanie kids voice, not sure how to describe, sounds so strange and ugly
That video doesn't make him justice, he sounds way better when he's actually recording. Also have in mind that he changed Meowth's tone starting from Hoenn onwards, he sounds like he's doing the old voice in that video.

I personally like him a lot, it's surprising how he also does low pitched voices such as Dr. Hibbert from The Simpsons. He's also the only Latin American voice actor that has participated in every single episode of the anime, no exceptions at all.
 
Polish dub is nice.
What I really like about it- Ash, James and Meowth have the same voices since OS (what is really interesting, James' voice sounds more mature in Kanto than Unova or Kalos).
This dubbing is based on US version.
Voices- that's a good thing- f.e. I find Misty's and Serena's better than english.
There were some problems with AG dub.
There's only First AG season dub- so AG is not well-known in Poland- You can see this if you read polish pokemon discussions.
Only time voices were totally different (even Ash's and Brock's) was first DP season.
 
Latin American dub is dead now.
Wow that SUCKS. So they dead on translate the English script since then?

Also, I have a very niche question about the Latin American Spanish dub - I recently read the bulbapedia article for Rocketshipping and there are some million-and-one examples listed for this dub specifically which (the way this person has written it) makes it sound like Jessie and James are strongly suggested to be a couple compared to the English and original versions. Is this interpretation true or has the shipper in question extrapolated beyond reason?
 
...All right, you triggered my Rocket-Rambling powers now

So they dead on translate the English script since then?
Yes, that's done at SDI Media's request. It's really stupid because the English dub is filled with North American slang and cultural references (I can't understand half of what Meowth says), so the logical thing to do would be to adapt those as Latin American jokes. But nope, it's all just a dull carbon copy of the English dialogue now.

For what's worth, sometimes James and Meowth would go overboard with the local Mexican slang (specially in DP), making it hard for us non-Mexicans to follow, but most of us still appreciated their charm and little running jokes they had. You could totally hear the TRio's actors having real fun when recording. SDI Media isn't in charge for XYZ onwards, so I think they started sneaking in some few jokes here and there. From what I've seen though, those are still minimal for some reason.

The worst part is that this "no script changes" rule happened just when Team Rocket returned to their original motto, which was always known to us because of the jokes they'd throw in to spice it up. James would always say "to extend our reach to [insert some Latin American city here]", or he'd sing some famous song at the end instead of the "surrender now" line. Back in Johto and Hoenn, getting your country or town mentioned in the motto was always very exciting for the local fans. Good times...

Also, I have a very niche question about the Latin American Spanish dub - I recently read the bulbapedia article for Rocketshipping and there are some million-and-one examples listed for this dub specifically which (the way this person has written it) makes it sound like Jessie and James are strongly suggested to be a couple compared to the English and original versions. Is this interpretation true or has the shipper in question extrapolated beyond reason?
Y'know, I'm not much of a RocketShipper myself, so I hadn't thoroughly read that article... WOW. A quick search tells me "Latin American" is mentioned 127 times there.

Sorry to dissapoint, but whomever wrote that has exceeded any limits a sane shipper would have.

I can't read them all but it seems like 90% of those are the songs James sings at the end of the motto. None of those mean anything, at all. As I said before, James would always sing a few lines from some song instead of the "surrender now" line, and as to be expected, several are bound to be ballads or romantic ones, which are usually the most popular ones. If we take those songs as proof he likes Jessie, then we could also take others as proof he's totally gay or queer as well.

Some others refer to James affectionaly nicknaming Jessie. Big deal, it's totally not like he does that with everyone and everything else as well... Seriously, Meowth is nicknamed "Chimuelo", Carnivine is nicknamed "Carnavalín", Victreebel is "Pumpkin Blossom" or "Artichoke", Yamask is "Yamazaki", Pikachu is "la Rata Kuki", Weezing's Smokescreen is "Morning Breath", Mime Jr.'s Tetter Dance is "the Macarena", Yamask's Haze is "Intestinal Gas"... I could go on and on. In any case, most of those are either "mamita" (lit. mommy, which is kinda-sorta like "darling" I guess, except only low-class people use it), or "Jessita", which wouldn't be any different from English James calling her "Jess". So no, that's not shipping proof either, it's just talking like regular pals do.

Some others are outright lies. Here's an example: there is one from BW047 which says some dialogue during the motto "seems to be sexual innuendo". The writer quotes the phrase "¡Y consume! ¡Yo soy Jam-me-me-mes!" and says it means "Use me! I am Jam-me-me-mes!", which I think may be true if you stretch it a lot. "Consume" literally means "eat", so if you say "consúmeme", that'd mean "eat me up", or, as the article says, "use me". Thing is, that isn't even what James actually said. The real dialogue is "¡Y con suma emoción yo soy Ja-me-me-mes!", which only means "And with a lot of emotion I am Ja-me-me-mes!", pretty much the same thing he always says in English.

So yeah, all in all, the person who wrote that is just extrapolating and hearing what they want to hear, and that article needs some serious, massive clean up. Probably get rid of all the "Latin American" ones except two or three. One I can guarantee is true is the one where James tells Cacnea he has a girlfriend already, which I guess you can interpret as him referring to Jessie if you want. Other than that, there isn't any more romantic subtext than there is in the Japanese or English versions, at all.
 
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This is a very interesting thread. I'm gonna just leave this comment here.

One country that's really werid is the Portuguese (Portugal) dub. I've read into it. They kept switching dubbing studios and Ash has had like 10 voice actors

Yeah that's true. Up until S11 Pokémon was aired by SIC and it was dubbed in Lisbon. In Portugal our dubbing industry is not really that big, so the "small stuff" was dubbed by studios that didn't really have that much money and worked on tight schedules. So that's why the voice actors changed a lot, this was pretty common in Portugal, as the voice actors are also full time stage and TV actors, whenever something happened that made them unavailable for a short period of time they were replaced because of the schedules. However sometimes they would return later.
It was dubbed at the studio Nacional Filmes from S1 to S10. S10 was dubbed at another studio, Dialectus, but most of the cast was kept (and there were some returns). However, this Dialectus studio was having a hard time when Pokémon was being dubbed (no money), and there were a lot of problems with S10 (the opening was kept in English, a lot of translation mistakes and lines with no sound almost every episode).
So Pokémon then moved from SIC to a different broadcast (BIGGS, which btw treats Pokémon really well) and as far as we know this new broadcast complained about the lack of quality of S10 dub to TPCi. And they were given a "corrected" version of S10 (with some lines redubbed) and Pokémon moved from Lisbon to Porto, to a studio called Cinemágica.
This new studio is one of the big dubbing studios in Portugal and they are used to dub "big stuff" (it is one of the two studios that work for Disney in Portugal), so they gave the Portuguese dub a voice director (it's crazy, but from S5 to S10 there was no voice director for the Portuguese dub), the voice actors started to be payed by line and not by episode (which allowed to dub to have as many different voice actors as they want, instead of having only 5-6 voice actors) and they are really perfectionist with the dub nowadays. But as it moved to a different city every voice actor was new to Pokémon.

So yeah, in Portugal we had some problems but, surprisingly, the Portuguese dub of Pokémon is recognized and one of the best dubs of anime series in Portugal, and the main reason for that is that while the voice actors kept changing they were always really great at voice acting. And they didn't really just try to imitate the American voices, they always gave their own touch to the characters, and the best example of this is Jessie, we had a lot of different voice actresses and they were always very different, but still very loyal to the character.

When Pokémon moved to Porto (from S11 onwards) we were afraid that it would be like what happened to 4KIds, but thankfully everything became better, even if it was pretty sad that some great voice actors left the series.

One of the strongest parts of our dub is the Team Rocket's motto, in my opinion. It is always very powerful and a nice display of the VA quality. Maybe I can share some of the mottoes so you can tell whether you like them or not (when I am hearing them I feel like I'm in heaven, though I am not sure if non-Portuguese people can feel it too). Here, here, here, here and here.
 
I know it's still the English dub but on CITV airings sometimes the brightness is lowered when Pikachu uses Thunderbolt or if there's a fast paced scene then sometimes it's slowed down. I believe it's also the same thing on Disney XD airing of the XY series.
 
...All right, you triggered my Rocket-Rabmling powers now
(y)

Honestly it's so sad to read what you wrote. Forget the nonsense that is translating the English dialogue directly, it sounds like your dub had so much originality before it was tampered with! Isn't that the gift of localisation? This line brought a little tear to my eye!:
James would always say "to extend our reach to [insert some Latin American city here]", or he'd sing some famous song at the end instead of the "surrender now" line. Back in Johto and Hoenn, getting your country or town mentioned in the motto was always very exciting for the local fans.
Next...
Sorry to dissapoint, but whomever wrote that has exceeded any limits a sane shipper would have.
Glad to clear this up. I agree that that page needs a thorough overhaul or preferably a total cull!
Victreebel is "Pumpkin Blossom" or "Artichoke"
:ROFLMAO:
 
Wait, seriously? How many other dubs are dead now in total? And hopefully the dead ones can be revived. Not everyone speaks english and/or Japanese.
 
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