Oh, and another thing, since this seems to pretty much focus on English translations specifically:Vegard Aune wrote: ↑Tue Nov 08, 2022 10:50 am Bad acting with good translations. Other folks here say that good acting can elevate a bad translation, but personally, an inaccurate portrayal of the story annoys me infinitely more than a poorly acted dub. Like, say the "Season 3" dub for Z was basically cast with nothing but Patrick Stewart-tier actors who delivered the jankiest of dialogue with complete conviction, making for a situation similar to Star Trek TNG season 1 where the scripts might be rubbish but you still kind of buy it because of how dang charismatic and immersive the acting is... But you still have a version that outright tells people that Vegeta is only evil because Freeza "made him" that way and that in his final moments he desperately regrets how his life turned out, or where Goku delivers the most Superman speech ever to Freeza, and I'm like... at that point it's just not the same story anymore. Can the inaccurately portrayed story still be compelling in its own right? Sure. But I just fundamentally disagree with the idea that dubs should even be allowed to massively alter the plot and characterization. My ideal for a dub is one where a person who watched the original version and a person who watched the dub can discuss the show together, and the fact that they watched different language versions never becomes relevant. Assuming neither is all that concerned with voice acting quality, this could in theory happen with a badly-acted, well-translated script. But when literal plot-points differ between the two versions, as is sometimes the case in Dragon Ball... Yeah the fact that they watched different versions is going to lead to confusion.
End of the day, I do think a dub needs both strong acting and a good and accurate script to be a quality dub, but if I have to pick one or the other, I will absolutely pick the translation.
Over here in Norway, a lot of our anime content is re-translated from English. Many other countries do it the same way. Bad performances with good translations only hurts one language version. Bad translations have a compounding effect into every other subsequent adaptation.