The history of anime dubbing has some funny twists, particularly when it comes to Dragon Ball. In the past, the approach towards localization was a lot looser, which led to some interesting decisions. Remember the Spanish dub of Dragon Ball, which translated Goku’s Kamehameha as Vital Wave?
The unusual term can be explained by an error which occurred when the production shifted to another studio. Dovi Studios, located in Catalonia, handled the first episodes of the series, and by episode 27 the series was taken over by the Andalusia-based Videotake Sur, which was a company that had worked on the Galician version of the anime. In the Galician version of Kamehameha it was heard as ‘Life Wave’ where ‘onda’ translated to English ‘wave’ is called ‘ola’ in Spanish. However, the Andalusian group never even grasped the original connotation of its name ‘Kamehameha’ – the title of a Hawaiian king and therefore decided on the term Vital Wave which worked in terms of the plot but didn’t quite correlate with the Japanese version.
Although this translation was later replaced with the more accurate term Kamehameha, for many fans of the Spanish dub, “Vital Wave” still brings some nostalgia and a chuckle. Much has changed in the dubbing of Dragon Ball in various languages, and now voicing Kamehameha is more common than using its equivalent.
This is a linguistic evolution and evidence of how dubbing for anime has been progressively evolving through the years, steadily getting rid of more forced interpretations toward that of the source language and culture. Perhaps fans will embrace again these oddities of adaptation but Kamehameha is definitely the name that everybody associates Goku’s deadly technique.