Audiovisual Translation – Subtitling or Dubbing?
When the decision is made whether to go for subtitling or dubbing content into a foreign language, there are many attributing factors that come into play.
Factors such as demographics, culture preferences, type of content, distribution channels, hosting platforms, costs, deadlines and many more are taken into consideration when concluding on what localization outcome is more appropriate for the content.
Does culture play a role in the choice between subtitling or dubbing?
Culture plays a huge role. The culture preferences of the country where the content will be viewed often determines whether the audience prefers to hear the dialogue in their native tongue or read subtitles.
In North-West Europe, Nordic countries, Balkan countries and Portugal generally dubbing is only done for works that are intended for children that are too young to read the subtitles fluently (although animated productions do have a tradition of being dubbed).
In Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, and the German-speaking part of Switzerland, practically all films, television series, shows and foreign soap operas are broadcast in dubbed versions created for the German market.
How the distribution channel influence the choice between subtitling or dubbing
The distribution channel is no doubt another important determining factor. It’s important to understand where your audience will be receiving your audiovisual content. With the shift in video distribution, more content is migrating online, and streaming is starting to outperform traditional distribution channels (like TV or cinema).
Due to the complexity of dubbing the turnaround time is substantially longer than subtitling. For dubbing a film the production house will need writers, linguists, voice actors, sound studios and post-production editing. Subtitling is a slightly easier process. Not to mention that the cost of dubbing is far more expensive than subtitling.
Content is created to awaken emotion, thus the translation of said is lot more challenging and it is also of great relevance.
Whether the translation of the script is for subtitling or dubbing, the meaning and sentiment must be conveyed, not the words. So it is important that the message is not lost in translation. How the message is conveyed, the excitement, pain, pleasure, and all the emotions need to be expressed in such a way that it is true to the source but also expressed as if it was originally created in the target language.
Subtitling and dubbing are different processes
The translation of content into subtitling or dubbing are different processes from each other. For both, you will need a transcript of the dialogue.
With subtitling, you are limited to 35-42 characters per line (including spaces) and two lines per subtitle. You will need to add timecodes, so that the subtitles appear and disappear with the spoken dialogue. It can be a challenge to cutting down the translations into the required number of characters per line. Even more so if you must do it while faithfully following the audio speed and leaving enough time for the reader to read through it all comfortably.
With dubbing, like before, you’ll need to get your script together and format it with timecodes. Once that’s done, translation begins, however with dubbing, there are not many technical parameters.
The general specification is to stick to the rough length of the English for the voice over.
About the author:
Kelly O’Donovan is the creator of GOSUB.tv – An education in the art of subtitling.
GOSUB was born from a passion and enthusiasm for subtitling and teaching.
Having started as a linguistic teacher and then moving on to become the Operations Manager of a leading subtitling agency, Kelly used her know-how, affection, and savvy to create efficient and exciting audiovisual courses.
From her years of experience working with producers, dubbing agencies, video-on-demand platforms, entertainment distributors, encoding houses and more, she has learnt a mountain of information about subtitling and closed captioning. She decided to couple this involvement with her other skill set, which is teaching.
GOSUB was created for you, and we hope that you will find her courses of value.
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I do a lot of documentary film work with a lesser-spoken European language. We make the choice to subtitle and not dub (not only because I personally think it’s incredibly distracting) because with subtitles, people can actually hear native speakers speak a lesser-spoken language. That’s really important to us.
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