(06-30-2015, 12:07 PM)Lilia Lia Wrote:(06-29-2015, 04:32 PM)Kaniko Niko Wrote: But I do know enough that every time I see people hark and place "the Japanese version" of anything on a pedestal I immediately get the referee to raise the yellow card.
I'm going to say it: It stinks of weeaboo.
I think you're making an adverse assumption here that's a little unfair. The OP was asking if there was a translation of the original Japanese anywhere that didn't have everyone "sounding British" like we see in the English script. Nobody has said that the Japanese script is "better." It's just that the English script is eye-rollingly bloated at times and it gives you a feeling like the grass might possibly be greener on the other side of the fence.
I'm glad that you highlighted the untranslatable nuance with your very helpful example though because it gives a lot of perspective. It's just that the overly formal tone of the English script tends to make the characters' lines feel artificial or belaboured when they ought to be more spontaneous. "Is aught amiss?" is hardly something you'd hear a person saying frantically after seeing something shocking happen. It sounds more like something a person would say to another over a cup of tea and with general disinterest as to whether aught actually was amiss.Â
Regardless of whether it's intended to "evoke an older time and place," it does the script a disservice by making it come off as less genuine.Â
I'll freely admit that even after editing my post to seem less barbarous, it was still rather caustic. While I apologize if there has been some friction, I stand firm by my words and shan't take them back.
However, there's another thing I'd much like to point out about the examples I've given since you've brought up a very good point about "how people really speak". Out of those five examples I've given you, only two of them are actually used in anything resembling modern Japanese—the first two. The other three of them, while grammatically correct, simply aren't used in the Japanese lexicon outside of fiction or someone attempting to be ironic. It's pretty much the Flowery Elizabethan English of Japanese. You may hear the Kansai dialect used in the last example, but mostly to stoke the fires of Osakan pride during Hanshin Tigers games.
While I cannot rightly deny that the overall recording and voice acting of the Japanese version tends to be more polished in spots than the English version, to disregard the scope of effort that went into capturing the very essence of what the narrative calls for in the English version: the accents, the startlingly correct period-English, the transliteration of tropes into their Occidental counterparts...
I'll say it again. It stinks of weeaboo.