Pronunciation issues are the most common cause of pick-ups in foreign-language voice-over recordings. Fortunately, there are many ways to avoid these mistakes, including pronunciation guidelines, quality assurance reviews, and reference recordings. Japanese VO recordings have one additional advantage – the use of transliterations, or writing English-language words in Japanese katakana characters, to aid in pronunciation, or for common usage in Japanese.
This post will provide 3 tips forJapanese voice-over recordings that contain transliterations.
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To understand transliterations, it helps to know a bit about how Japanese is written. Japanese writing is composed of two main kinds of characters. Kanji, the Chinese characters adopted into Japanese during the first millennium AD, are used for most of the traditional words and names in Japanese. Kana, on the other hand, are characters that are used to represent syllables. There are two main kinds of kana – hiragana, and katakana. This latter group – katakana – is used for writing loan words in Japanese. These can be anything from loan words acquired from English, Dutch, Portuguese, German and French (known as gairaigo), to scientific names, names of companies, or names of famous people and places.
Katakana can effectively be used to transliterate just about any word in English. This means that katakana is incredibly useful when recording in Japanese, since many Japanese voice-over talents are either not fluent in English – or don’t speak or read it at all. Thus, katakana becomes very useful when providing pronunciations of English-language terms during a foreign-language voice-over production – they can effectively help talents through long sessions. However, here are a few things that you should keep in mind about transliterations.
Japanese already has thousands of loan words – the aforementioned gairaigo. Often these words sound very similar to the English source word, though using Japanese vowel and consonant sounds, and often word terminations. It’s also good to remember that the list of gairaigo is constantly growing. Case in point – the Japanese word ググる, which means “to Google,” and which sounds akin to “guguru.”
It’s good to keep in mind that some of the terms in your translations are not phonetic transliterations, but actually words that form part of the Japanese language. In fact, they’ll be entries in an English-Japanese dictionary. Just because they sound like English words, it doesn’t mean that they’re transliterations – once they’ve become gairaigo, they’re part of the Japanese language.
Japanese doesn’t have the same vowel or consonant sounds as English. (This is widely true across languages – most languages don’t have the same set of vowel or consonant sounds as any other language, and a good thing to remember for foreign-language audio recordings.) Because of this, transliterations will never sound like exact English pronunciations. In some cases, they may sound very different to the ear of a native English-speaker.
In general, you can’t expect non-native English speakers to pronounce English terms (like names of people or places) perfectly. But this is actually what you want. A Japanese voice-over talent with perfect English pronunciation will sound wrong to a Japanese audience – but a talent who pronounces English words with a noticeable Japanese accent will sound just right.
This is a must for any Asian voice-over recordings, and for all foreign-language VO production. (Of course, JBI Studios provides a native-speaker director for all its sessions.) It’s especially important in recordings into Japanese, or any language that has transliterations. Why? Because transliterations are best understood by a bilingual speaker, someone who can can tell how they’re created.
Again, many of the best Japanese voice-over talents aren’t fluent in English – in fact, many of them don’t speak it at all. A bilingual director will help them navigate the transliterations, and know when a pronunciation should hew closely to the English (for example, for a brand name), and when it should avoid any Anglicization at all (for example, with gairaigo). The director can mediate the needs of a US-based client with the needs of the Japanese audience, for which fidelity to the native sound of the language is key.
Japanese isn’t the only one. Transliterations can be used in Arabic voice-over, Russian voice-over, and many other languages that have non-Latin, phonetic writing systems. Like with Japanese, these languages have vowel and consonant sounds that don’t quite line up to English, so it’s key to not expect “perfect” English pronunciations – but again, these aren’t desirable in foreign-language audio.
Likewise, for any language that has transliterations, it’s good to engage the linguist and any in-country assets into the project as early as possible. They can help develop translation (and transliteration) plans for each language, and help create glossaries. This kind of advance work will cut down on audio and video translation services costs in general, and improve the quality and consistency of the voice-over scripts.
Download “7 Myths of Audio & Video Translation,” JBI Studios’ indispensable guide to audio translation and dubbing.