Japanese dubbing and localization.

Japanese encodes the relationship between two characters into the grammar of every sentence they speak. Getting that wrong does not sound slightly off, it changes who the characters are to each other.

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Hear it in Japanese.

Japanese we have delivered.

Every clip says how it was produced.

Keigo is characterization, not politeness.

Honorific and humble forms mark status and distance. A mid-scene switch matters, so we map register per character pair.

Polite form
Status, social distance, out-group. Applied uniformly as the safe default, it drains the relationships out of the story.
Plain form
A switch into it mid-scene asserts closeness, drops a guard, or is deliberately rude.
Our method
Register mapped per character pair, shifts marked, recorded in the glossary before recording.

Where the pitch falls changes the word.

An inconsistent accent pattern reads as regionally ambiguous or simply wrong. It is a casting and direction matter, checked in dubbing QC.

Tokyo pattern
Kansai pattern

Pitch accent can distinguish otherwise identical words, and varies between Tokyo and Kansai patterns.

Mora timing against fixed animation.

Japanese is mora-timed and usually needs more syllables than English. On fixed animation, that collides with the flaps.

Source line

Dubbed line

Mouth movement

Adaptation is written to the mouth movement in syllable count and phrase shape.

Services in Japanese.

Dubbing and voice-over. Translation and adaptation written to timing and flaps. Subtitling and closed captions handling mixed kanji, hiragana and katakana. Transcription. Audio post, mixing and mastering by our own engineering team. Five-stage quality control with an independent reviewer.

What comes to us in Japanese.

Animation and anime, in both directions. Creator content localized for Japanese audiences. OTT and film catalog. Games and interactive audio. E-learning and corporate.

Frequently
Asked Questions.

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How do you handle Japanese honorific language?

By mapping register per character pair before recording and marking where it shifts during the story. Keigo encodes relationship and status, so applying one uniform politeness level across a script removes the relationships from the dialogue even though the grammar is correct.

Do you dub anime into Japanese, or from it?

Both directions. Working into Japanese means fitting mora-timed dialogue to existing mouth movement; working from it means handling a source whose animation was often timed to a performance recorded before the visuals were finished.

Does pitch accent matter for casting?

Yes. Japanese is pitch-accented and patterns vary regionally, most noticeably between Tokyo and Kansai. Inconsistent accent reads as wrong to native listeners and is checked during dubbing QC.

Can you handle Japanese subtitles?

Yes, including mixed kanji, hiragana and katakana, and the line-breaking conventions that differ from Latin-script languages.

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