Dubbing

This entry is concerned with dubbing as a modality of audiovisual translation. Here, our main objective is to present a thorough analysis of dubbing, taking into account every aspect that influences the entire process, including historical, professional, technical and contextual elements. For this purpose, we start by defining dubbing and delimiting its regular use and standardised processes in the main ‘dubbing countries’, as these nations are commonly known. We then describe the most important characteristics of dubbing with special emphasis on the aspects related to the synchronisation stage, which, in our opinion, is the phase that best characterises this modality and distinguishes it from any other. This phase is based on striking a balance among the different types of synchrony (character, content and visual synchrony, i.e., lip sync, kinetic synchrony, and isochrony). We present some of the most common translation problems, which have the greatest influence on the final choice of linguistic elements in the target text, followed by a summary of the specific characteristics of audiovisual macro-genres and their translation for dubbing (films and series, documentaries, cartoons and advertising). We also recapitulate the main lines of research currently under way, without forgetting that this modality is also applied in university education and represents a very interesting field of transfer that is already bearing fruit in the form of stylebooks and guides, which are used by both dubbing studios and audiovisual media corporations. The entry will also provide key bibliographic references, where we aim to find a balance between what is considered classic research and essential knowledge and the most recent studies, which can offer new ways of analysing dubbing and improving translation practices.