Creating credible and natural-sounding dialogue in dubbing: Can it be taught?

Abstract

This paper sets out to bridge the gap between theory and practice by suggesting activities and resources that could be used in the audiovisual translation (AVT) classroom when training students to achieve credible and natural-sounding dialogue in dubbing. Following a competence-and task-based approach, these activities have been implemented by the author when teaching English into Spanish dubbing at master's level and explore the advantages of using translation technology (e.g. translation memory and corpus management tools) in the AVT classroom. When suggesting activities, the emphasis is also placed on what can be learnt from other disciplines, such as creative writing, and on the links that can be established with other subjects (e.g. translation technology) in order to improve future audiovisual translators' instrumental competences and understanding of the specific features of original and dubbed audiovisual dialogue.

Subtitling and Dubbing of Idiomatic Expressions in the American TV Series WandaVision

“…Since dubbing is conveyed through the spoken medium, it is necessary for the translator to create a dialogue that sounds credible and natural to the target audience. Another challenge in dubbing is the character synchrony between the voice of the original character and the voice of the dubber (Baños, 2021).…”

ARIAS-BADIA, Blanca. Subtitling Television Series. A Corpus-Driven Study of Police Procedurals. Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Wien, Peter Lang, 2020, 248 pp., ISBN 978-1-78707-796-6 (print), ISBN 978-1-78707-798-0 (ePub)

“…The Audiovisual Translation (AVT) and Media Accessibility fields have demonstrated an ongoing interest in corpus research both f or d escript iv e purposes (Matamala, 2008;Baños, 2013;Reviers, 2017) and f or t eac hing purposes (Rica Peromingo, 2019;Baños, 2021). In an interdisciplinary f ashion, Blanca Arias-Badia's book Subtitling Television Series : A Corpus -Driven Study of Police Procedurals takes on the task of describing the principal linguistic f eatures of crime f iction television scripts and their corresponding Spanish subtitles.…”