Dream Tropes Wiki/No Dub For You

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When a foreign media property is licensed and released overseas — in this case the English-speaking world — you would expect a dub in the local language, right? However, that's not always the case. Sometimes, the product contains the original language, and only the original language. It is the linguistic equivalent of the Vanilla Edition, and somewhat related to Bad Export for You depending on who you ask.

There can be many reasons for not dubbing something:

1. The prospective market is not enough to justify the cost of a dub. (Dubbing is expensive!)
2. Materials essential to the creation of a dub — namely the Music & Effects tracks - have been lost.
3. For whatever reason, someone at either end refuses to allow a dub to be created.
4. The material is either too reliant on the Japanese language to be adequately dubbed or includes situations that are illegal or otherwise too risky for Western television. Sometimes, anime that takes heavy use of the English language may fit into this description as well.
5. Sometimes, certain genres themselves are usually the factor of not dubbing something simply because these genres don't sell well enough to justify dubbing (sports anime and Slice of Life titles are usually given this treatment). Certain themes that may turn away western audiences (such as Lolicon and Shotacon anime along with anime with Brother–Sister Incest) may be given this treatment.
6. The English producers don't want to compromise the show's integrity (due in part to the bad reputation dubs ultimately started to get), and feel it would be better to have it released only in its original language.
7. The English producers were simply that lazy and didn't bother with the show.
8. Sometimes, low sales of a particular work in the work's home country would make it too risky to warrant an English dub for business and financial reasons, although there are few exceptions.
9. Labor and union issues may arise if a particular work is dubbed since many of the original source characters have been dubbed by different studios with different union statuses. This is especially true with Massive Multiplayer Crossover video games such as Jump Force and Fate/Grand Order.
10. Works with Loads and Loads of Characters may be too tedious to get individual voice actors to voice each character (although it is certainly possible)
11. Because international licensing is handled by region rather than by language area (not a big deal for Latin Spanish, German, or Japanese, but a HUGE problem for English or European Spanish), it is not uncommon for one region to get a dub but another to lack it. This is especially the case for anime that air on the transnational English-language satellite channel Animax, which broadcasts across South and Southeast Asia; the channel produces many of their own anime dubs — often in Hong Kong or Singapore — but does not sublicense those dubs out, leading to many series that have full English dubs (a few even recorded in North America!) being released subtitled only in the US and Canada.

This trope became more and more prevalent during The New '10s with the anime market in decline and many licensors like Bandai Entertainment, Geneon, and ADV Films falling and closing down (with English dubs being the biggest cut from the market in order to survive the declining sales). This created a negative backlash in the old Subbing vs. Dubbing where some anime fans (particularly the dub haters) putting the blame entirely on the dubs, the dub fans, and (to the most extreme extent) the voice actors involved in the dubs and claiming dub fans are not the true supporters of the anime industry. Nozomi Entertainment and Discotek Media completely refuse to dub any new unreleased anime they license. NIS America also refused to do any non-video-game dubbing until March 2014, because of what happened to Bandai, Geneon, and ADV (they stated that they were "looking into it" for the future, eventually re-releasing Toradora! with an English dub). Despite this, English dubs in anime are still largely being produced for the North American markets, but most of them nowadays are done in Houston and Dallas, and occassionally, Los Angeles, rather than New York or Canada note , and Bang Zoom! Entertainment nowadays avert the All-Star Cast trope by using newer name voice actors in their anime dubs and even hold open auditions every year in Anime Expo in search for newer talents. Sentai Filmworks was a big proponent of this trope until about 2011 when they got back to regular dubbing, and only releases some of their catalogue sub-only (some of their titles that were initially released sub-only have received English dubs years later, such as Maria†Holic and Special A). They even produced more dubs than FUNimation in 2013. The revival of Toonami and the introduction of Neon Alley in North America have shown that there is still a market for English dubbed anime. Some popular streaming/downloading sites like iTunes and Netflix still routinely refuse to take most non-dubbed anime. While not nearly as many dubs are being produced as in their heyday, sub-only titles are still, in general, limited to niche modern titles and older ones that never got dubs.

Occasionally, a series will initially be released sub-only, but will eventually be re-released with a dub. Some examples are also highlighted below. Even more rarely, a title will receive a dub, but is re-released without it.

Lack of dubs is also very common in regions of other languages when it comes to video games. For the vast majority of Japanese games that make it to Western countries, American English is the only dub that's ever gonna be made. Meaning audiences from Europe (except the UK and Ireland, of course) and Latin America have no choice but to rely on subs only. The thing is, if dubs are expensive and complex in TV shows and movies already, in video games the costs go Up to Eleven, since the process is much more complex and time-consuming: special recording realities, taking care of the programming, long QA procedures, etc. Even games made with English as the first language can often lack dubs, specially those published by smaller companies and/or those released in countries outside of the so-called "EFIGS" note region.

Visual Novels localized in America usually don't get English dubs (particularly from Sekai Project) due to the fact that visual novels are a very niche interest in America, and most of them don't have much voiced dialogue anyway. Usually the only visual novels to get English dubs are developed by indie developers or Americans themselves.

Sometimes this will be inverted when a show is only released dubbed. This is most common with shows aimed at young children overseas (such as Pokémon), since the licensor (particular 4Kids Entertainment) believes not enough of an audience will be interested in watching the sub to justify the cost of making it. It can also happen if the Japanese creators are concerned about reverse importing.

Note that shows that were never expected to be published overseas in the first place, naturally, do not count for this trope.