Transcript What’s dubbing?

What’s dubbing?
the replacement of one sound track
(music, sound effects, dialogue,
natural sound, etc.) by another
the replacement of the dialogue and
narration of the foreign or source
language (SL) into the language of
the viewing audience, the target
language (TL).
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Dubbing includes :
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the addition of music and sound
effects to the original dialogue,
the omission or replacement of
unwanted or poorly recorded audio
the re-recording of the entire
dialogue, narration and music.
dubbing requires :
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the substitution of the voice of
each character on the screen by
the voice of one actor.
The dubber's voice:
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Another requirement of successful
dubbing is the compatibility of the
dubber's voice with the facial and body
expressions visible on the screen. Lip
synchronization is usually seen as the
strongest constraint on accurate
translation. The script editor modifies the
"raw translation" of each utterance in
order to match it with the lip movements
of the person seen on the screen.
LANGUAGE AND TELEVISION
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Audiovisual media, especially
television, restore the pre-print
condition of harmony of senses by
using the ear and the eye and
calling into play the remaining
senses of touch, smell and taste.
Orality:
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Romanticizing the orality of television is
as problematic as denouncing it as an
impoverished form of speech. Language
changes continually, and television, as a
social institution and powerful technology,
creates new discourses, new modes of
language use, new forms of translation,
and new forms of communication
between communities with different
linguistic abilities. This has led to the
flourishing of translation or "language
transfer" in the form of dubbing,
subtitling, and voice-over.
So:
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English language programs, mostly
produced in the United States and
England, are popular throughout the
world. Television has accelerated
the spread of English as a global
lingua franca.
Dubbing / orality
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One of the types of translated text
that comes closest to the orality
pole is dubbed films, where by
"dubbing" is meant the technique of
postsincronization consisting in the
deleting of the original voice of the
actor pronouncing hie text during
the shots, and its substitution with
another recording.
Dubbing as an intralingual selftranslation:
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The authorial dubbing is the one where the
director himself decides to have his actors’ voices
dubbed, either with the same actors’ voice, or
with the dubbers’ voices. Such type of dubbing,
usually occurring within the same language, is a
sort of intralingual self-translation. The director
decides to publish his film with dubbed voices, so
that the viewer or the critic can judge the whole
filmic text, and they know that the author’s
intention coincides with the result they have
before them.
One of the reasons why a director may decide to
have a given character’s line dubbed can lie in the
desire to give that character a given voice,
different from the chosen actor’s. The timbre of
the voice, its intensity, the pronunciation,
inflections, pauses, whispers are all features
concurring to shape the poetics of a movies
character;
Dubbing as interlingual translation:
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In most cases, however, dubbing is a
process with which the director and the
authors have nothing to do, and that is
motivated by the desire to propose an
interlingual translation of dialogues to
facilitate the fruition of the work in
countries with cultures and languages
differing from the original. The buyers of
the dubbing are not directors, but
distributors; they make these decisions
within the framework of general choices
in marketing or commercialization of the
film product.
A high-quality dubbing :
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As Shuttleworth and Cowie write, it «is
designed to give the impression that the
actors whom the audience sees are
actually speaking in TL"2. Dubbing is
considered successful when it can
coordinate the actor’s lips movements
with the sounds produced by the dubber,
especially those sounds that make use of
the lips.
A high-quality dubbing has, therefore, the
aim of pretending that an actor’s playing
is acting directly in the language of the
receiving culture. In other words, the aim
of interlingual dubbing is denying the
translated nature of the filmic text.
Dubbing/ Subtitling /Captioning
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Dubbing is the addition or substitution of
a dialogue track in a language other than
the original. Dubbing can completely
replace an original dialogue track, replace
everything but some features (like
songs), or can be added to an original
track (e.g., running in a slight delay after
the original language track, which has its
volume lowered). It is an accessibility
technique for nondisabled people who do
not understand the source language,
though it is also useful to blind and
visually-impaired people.
Subtitling:
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Subtitling is a written translation of
dialogue. It can be applied to a range of
film, video, and multimedia formats,
including television, home video, first-run
movies, and online video.
Subtitling is not captioning
Subtitling, like voice-over, presents the
translated and source languages
simultaneously, but it transforms speech
into writing without altering the source
sound track
Captioning:
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Captioning is the transcription of
speech and important sound effects
for the benefit of deaf and hard-ofhearing viewers and others. It can
be applied to a range of film, video,
and multimedia formats, including
television, home video, online
video, installations, and more.
“looping”:
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dubbing can also refer more generally to
adding or replacing sound effects or
spoken lines by the source actors
themselves in the language of the film's
production, often because of poor sound
quality in the original recording or for the
deletion of expletives from the theatrical
version for release on television. While
this latter form of post-synchronized
revoicing is present in virtually all modern
films, it is often called "looping” to
distinguish it from dubbing as language
translation.
“Voice-over”:
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a nonsynchronous voice that does not
replace the source text and language. It is
added to the sound track but does not
replace the source text and language.
Popular in Russia and Poland and used
more in television than in filmtranslation,
voice-over is a relatively minor mode
compared to dubbing and subtitling.
Documentaries commonly use voice-overs,
as there is usually a voice in the
background describing a scene. Voice-over
services do not require the precision
involved in dubbing; however, they still
need to follow a time sequence. This
requires the proper equipment and
expertise.
Dubbing or subtitling?
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subtitles prefer formal language, the language
used is dubbing is more colloquial.
the language used for subtitling needs to be
more compact - it occurs not only because of
space limits but also due to time constraints.
Subtitles must generally compact all the information
in only two lines of a maximum of about 35
characters each and the time available for display
(from ½ to 1 ½ seconds) depends mainly on the
speed at which the material is spoken.
dubbing should not be seen as a rigid kind of
phonological translation, in which source text is
translated sound by sound. It is only designed to
give the impression that the actors whom the
audience sees are actually speaking in the target
language. As it favours more colloquial language,
it tends to be more "natural" and spontaneous
when compared to subtitles.
Which one is best?
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To answer this question in simple
words, one could say that the
choice of one or other approach is
just a matter of the preference of
the country for which the new
version is being produced. However,
it can also be added that such a
choice implies "cultural, ideological
and linguistic" implications.
In fact:
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One might say that subtitling is more "authentic", since it
does not hide the original sound. It is also a much faster and
a more inexpensive process. However, from the audiences'
viewpoint, it requires more cognitive effort when compared to
dubbing.
On the one hand, the dubbing process involves less
compression of the message and demands less cognitive
effort. On the other hand, it can be fifteen times more
expensive than subtitling due to its characteristics and also
takes much longer to perform.
Talking about different countries, subtitles tend to be
favoured for tradition reasons in Scandinavia, The
Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Greece, Israel, Egypt and
throughout the Arab world. By contrast, dubbing is "the
standard method of translating film and television in a
number of European countries such as France, Germany, Italy
and Spain."
It is also important to consider that dubbing can be seen as a
way of "naturalising" an imported film and, at the same time,
somehow minimise its foreign and its possible influence by
completely concealing the original dialogue.
Dub localization
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is the practice of altering the
dubbed translation of a foreign
language film or television series to
further adapt it for a "local"
audience.
Controversial dub localizations :
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Ex:Many localized dubs are the object of much
controversy. One relatively famous example of a
controversial dub localization is Sailor Moon, which
underwent heavy editing and many changes including
the deletion of whole episodes, alteration of the
animation itself (for example, flipping the animation in
some scenes so that cars weren't driving on the
"wrong" side of the road compared to American driving
laws), extensive use of valley girl slang and other
slanguage, and even name changes that included
changing the city from Tokyo to the fictional American
city of "Crossroads" (oddly, the future version of the
city was still named Crystal Tokyo
the making of Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune into
(apparently blood) relatives in an attempt to disguise
their originally lesbian relationship
A bit of practice:
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You have to offer the English subtitles for
the following three stills from Women on
the Verge of a Nervous
Breakdown/Mujeres al borde de un
ataque de nervios, a 1988 film by Spanish
director Pedro Almodóvar.
Context: After an unsuccessful attempt
at suicide, Candela has just told her
friends her worries. She finishes her
explanation as follows
(1):' Pepa, yo no sabía dónde
presentarme.' (Constraints: you are
allowed a maximum of 30 spaces )
(2) 'Yo no puedo ir a Málaga con esta
papeleta.'
*Málaga: city in the south of Spain
where Candela comes from and her
family lives.
*papeleta: in a figurative sense,
problem. (Constraints: you are allowed
a maximum of 30 spaces. )
(3) 'Bastante es que soy modelo.
Tú qué dices?‘ (Constraints: you
are allowed a maximum of 45
spaces)
Context: Two police detectives have come to
Pepa's penthouse. One of them starts interrogating
her. She clearly feels uncomfortable and tells him:
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'Por qué no se sienta
aquí y me interroga
cómodamente? Es que
me va a dar tortícolis.’
- Why don't you sit
here and question me
in comfort? Because I
am going to get stiff
neck
Constraints: you are
allowed to use a
maximum of 60
spaces.
For the commercial version with
English subtitle:
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You have to decide on:
what information to include and
what to leave out
what cultural adjustments, if any,
need to be made
how to present the message: one or
two lines
how to break the lines in the case of
two-line subtitles
A possible solution:
The professional world OF
SUBTITLING:
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The actual translation of the
dialogue is only one of several
steps.
1) the first task is the spotting (also
known as timing or cueing) of the
film, which is normally done by a
technician. This consists in noting in
the dialogue list when subtitles
should start and stop
2)
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the next step is to translate from one
language to another, carried out by the
translator. The final stage consists in
adjusting the length of the subtitles to the
spaces available, paying special attention to
the syntactical presentation of the subtitles
and making sure that cuts and changes of
scenes are respected. The person in charge
of adjusting tends to be a different
professional known, by some, as the
subtitler
3) The Dialogue list
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In an ideal situation, the translator works
from a document called a dialogue list (also
known as post-production script) that is the
(more or less) exact compilation of the
linguistic exchanges that take place in the
audio-visual product. Besides the linguistic
material, a good dialogue list offers
metatextual information about the social
context and the cultural connotations,
makes clear the meaning of words or
expressions that may be obscure for the
translator, explains puns and plays on
words, offers the correct spelling of proper
names and indicates ironic statements, etc.
4) Spatial and temporal
constraints:
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In order to minimise the impact of the
written text on the original image, it is
common practice to present a maximum of
two lines of subtitles at a time. Given the
width of the screen, and taking into
consideration the overriding need for
legibility, each line can usually
accommodate a maximum of 35 characters
(including blanks and punctuation
symbols). The golden rule applied for
subtitling purposes is that an average
viewer can read a two-line subtitle of 70
characters in 6 seconds.
Some other considerations that the subtitler
has to respect are:
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-the subtitle projection has to be synchronised with
the actual dialogue, that is, it has to appear on
screen at the same time as the characters speak and
has to be removed when they stop speaking;
-subtitles should not be left too long on screen
because the viewer will tend to re-read the
message;
-in order to guarantee its reading, no subtitle should
appear for less than a second;
-there has to be some time between subtitle
projections so that viewers realise that there has
been a change of subtitle, otherwise the eye would
not realise that there has been a change and will not
read the new message;
-a subtitle should not run over a cut or change of
scene.
Visibility and legibility of
subtitles:
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although subtitles are usually placed
at the bottom of the screen to
guarantee minimum pollution of the
image, they should be placed in a
different area when the background
does not allow its reading or,
alternatively, be superimposed on a
dark-coloured box that will contrast
with the written message and favour
its reading
For this reason:
In order to facilitate the readability
of the message, line-breaks ought
to be applied in such a way as to
coincide with the natural breaks in
sentence structure:
 Ex: Unacceptable
It was unexpected. Mary, the
teacher, does not speak that way.
Better: It was unexpected.
Mary,the teacher, doesn’t speak
that way.
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