Advantages & Disadvantages of Dubbing

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Advantages & Disadvantages  of Dubbing

Dubbing consists in “an alternate, synchronised soundtrack of the complete dialogue”.  Some countries tend to traditionally use subtitles (Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Dutch-speaking Belgium) whereas others prefer dubbing (France, Spain, Germany and Italy). The choice of one approach rather than another not only depends on the country’s preferences, but also on its cultural, ideological and linguistic particularities. 

Advantages of dubbing

–     Unless they pay good attention to reading lips in the original version, viewers will rarely be able to identify potential mistakes. Thus, in case of censorship, dubbing is generally favoured. This is what happened in Spain under Franco’s dictatorship, which prohibited all original versions with subtitles and improved synchronisation in order to change dialogues and convey so‑called higher moral values.

–     Dialogues do not need to be abbreviated as in theory there is no limit to space. However, the writer of a dubbed script will have to pay attention to the movements of the lips.

–     The viewers can focus their attention on the images and the words at the same time whereas in subtitled versions they constantly have to look up and down the screen to be able to follow the story.

Disadvantages of dubbing

–     Synchronisation is the major element that needs to be taken into account  and it poses considerable problems. When dubbing, the writer is not free to modify the text as he wishes to make the speech in the target language more natural. On the contrary, he has to strictly follow what appears on the screen and the dubbed dialogue should fit the lip movements of the actors.

–     Even when the lip movements of the actors is well synchronised with the voice in the translated version, dubbing only creates “the illusion of an illusion”. A perfect synchronisation is almost impossible as one-to-one substitutions are very uncommon. For instance, some words have only one syllable in English and two or more in French. This is the case for the English word hat, the French translation of which is chapeau.

–     Dubbing a movie can be up to 15 times more expensive than adding subtitles. Thus, it is advisable to use subtitles for languages that are not commonly spoken because dubbing would not be cost-effective.