I agree Faldage...and have you noticed that, more often than not, the voice they use to do the dubbing sounds only faintly like the original? Arghhh, how annoying is that!!

It is even worse with translated movies (we get English to French here). The voices they assign to the characters never really 'fit' their look (let alone the lip movements) and then there is the dubbing over the dubbed voice when a swear word needs to be erased.

Just be thankful you don't have women doing little children voices in your movies. It grates on the nerves.

The Japanese-to-the-rest-of-the-world interface comes up with some hilarious messes from time to time, but probably one of the most memorable for me was one of those interminable "samurai go mad in downtown Kyoto and commit mass murder" movies which used to get screened with somewhat monotonous regularity on New Zealand late night television.

The Japanese seem to dub these films in English before they're released and the cultural gulf yawned wide in this particular case. The voice of the lead samurai (who'd accounted for half the population of Honshu within five minutes of the film's beginning and hadn't even worked up so much as a sweat) had been dubbed by someone who had a fairly high-pitched voice and an incipient lisp. I watched the movie through tears of laughter ... now if only he'd looked like Frankie Howerd!

See http://www.engrish.com for some hilarious messups in translating Japanese into English, most often on business signs apparently in Japan.

Yah, Engrish.com is always worth a cruise.