Such as in English we have a word for "sad," and then "morose," which describes a kind of sadness.

TJ: And what really is the difference? Not only the difference of the meaning or the difference of the language, but the inherent difference? Just last week we were playing around with the word "nice" because we hate the word "nice." I researched and learned that what nice actually means is "accurate."

JK: And Japanese is a language in which the same sound can change meaning with how you inflect it. The word "baka" could mean "idiot," like you would say to your friends as a joke. But if you inflect it forcefully enough it could be like cursing someone's family.

TJ: So with "3x3 Eyes" we tried to take advantage of this layered understanding of language. There's a character that assumes an aristocratic attitude, and there's no reason why his dialogue can't be aristocratic. If we have a character that has a Chinese accent, we decide to throw a little of that. We started seeing just how far we can take this and how far people will be willing to go with this. Some people got upset at it because they didn't agree with the word choices we decided to use: "He's not ecstatic, he's happy." But you can create rules of language for a character, decide how big this character's vocabulary is, how slang-oriented his vocabulary is, and where the slang comes from. There are characters in "3 X 3 Eyes" that have a modern Tokyo accent, a very young accent, very much filled with words like "cool" and "great." Of course they use Japanese equivalents. Now, we have the choice of translating the script straight with a dull, flat language, or we can try to tap into the slang in our own society and extrapolate an English equivalent for the language rules of the Japanese characters.

In the first OAV series, Pai obviously had a foreign accent.

TJ: She's a Sanjiyan who grew up in a netherworld close to Tibet.

JK: It's more of a broken English accent. We had to be careful, however, not to make her sound annoying or retarded but just to make it known that there is a colloquial difference to her. And all of the people that were in China and Hong Kong, since it was, at the time, a British protectorate, we tried to write their dialogue in accordance with British English.

So a lot of the art of dubs is pretty much in the bookwork.

TJ: Language. Language. Language.

JK: It's research, it's language, but it's also casting. If you're actors aren't right for the roles, it's going to suck despite the bookwork.

The conversation with New Generation Pictures stretched into the better part of two hours and covered subjects ranging from anime demographics in America to the role star power plays in the sales for dubs. Check back with Akadot on Aug. 27 for a more extensive feature on anime dub directing that will include the rest of this conversation along with interviews with David Williams ("Dirty Pair"), Greg Weisman ("3 X 3 Eyes"), Wendee Lee ( "Outlaw Star"), Fusako Shiotani ( "Tenshi Ni Narumon"), Melissa Williamson ("Cowboy Bebop"), and more.

To read more about the 3X3 Eyes dub by New Generation, read Akadot Dub Track columnist, Ryan Mathews' review here.

Visit the New Generation Pictures website.