English Songs Turned Japanese

[MioDioDaVinci]

I've seen quite a few fights arise in the fandom over English songs covered in Japanese. Some argue the point that it's disrespectful to ruin a perfectly good English song with the translation, while others say it's perfectly fine because not every voice can make understandable Engrish. Of course, party one then comes back with the expected "then don't cover it at all" and the dispute escalates.

Opinions?

Spoiler

I'm neutral towards them. While I'll always love the English version more, it's still nice to have a Japanese version to turn to in time of need. While yes, one could argue that if the voice can't create understandable Engrish, don't cover the song, it's still nice to be able to cover it no matter what.

 

[Meta]

I don't think there's a problem with it. I would rather see a Japanese version of an English song than an Engrish one, personally.

Also not to mention a lot of people also make English version of Japanese songs. (maybe not so many with UTAU, but you see fan covers of things so I wonder how many people have a problem with that).

I think it's a stupid thing for people to get worked up about imho.

 

[smeen]

I- Sometimes don't even get where people are coming from. I heard Japanese translaion of Beatles-songs and Nobody was talking about how disrespectful that is.

Why? Why would this be a problem?

 

[FastSpeedy]

In my opinion, it is actually exciting to see an English song being made into a Japanese version (which doesn't mean they are actual translations of the song) and vice versa. It shows how much that person likes the song, and also helps other people to understand what the song is about.

However, it should be a GOOD version. Not a word-by-word translation that doesn't even fit in the original melody of the song. A good version must follow the original rythm and needs to mantain the original meaning, even though you need to tweak the lyrics a bit so they fit. But I've seen great versions of songs out there (both English>Japanese and Japanese>English), so I think it's great.

 

[Ciel Phantomhive]

I've done a few English > Japanese translations of English originals and I don't really see how it could be a problem? There's plenty of English fandubs of Japanese songs and I've never seen anyone complain about that.
And personally, I think a translation is preferable to Engrish. ^^''

 

[Ant]

Whaaaaaaaat? Are they joking?


Someone needs to look up the word "disrespectful" in the dictionary.

 

[TheSnowSongstress]

I don't see why people complain about it, i mean everyone loves people like Miky-tan and Rockleetist and Razzy for their Japanese -> English lyrics and covers, so why can't people do English -> Japanese?

 

[Galuxius]

Well, that's harder than turning Japanese songs into English, I guess. Hmm.. you need a good knowledge of the Japanese language, Google Translate won't do.

Basically, it's an impossible task without a GCSE in Japanese and Music.

 

[NaughtyPichu]

I have absolutely no qualms with it, heck I even really like it some times OuO... don't like it, don't listen to it... seems so simple but I guess not to some peeps -shruggeth-

 

[KitWistful]

I'd only have a problem if the person doing the translating wasn't experienced with both languages. It's harder to get into a song that can't be understood by anybody. In any case, I'd prefer an engrish cover, cause I love english and I love engrish.

But if the cover was especially well tuned/had a good voicetype, I think I could overlook the issue of how it was parsed.

 

[scarfu]

... What
is this a legitimate problem some people have LMAO

To me like, English voicebanks are a very difficult and tedious task to record and oto and go through--furthermore, English voicebanks that are useable and DLable are fairly rare, so like people really have a limited choice in what kind of voices they can use in their ENG covers to begin with.

If you translate the song over to JP, you then open up the entirety of the 3500+ UTAU that are in existence and you can find a voice type much more suited for the cover, you know?

To me it'd feel rather pretentious to hate on an ENG song translated into JP because it's really more convenient in the long run.