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What Is Dubbing?

Dubbing is replacing the speech in a film, series or video with new recorded speech, usually a translation into another language, so viewers hear the story in their own language instead of reading subtitles. The new lines are timed to the picture, and the music and sound effects of the original are kept.

Example
Original (English):  “We started with three clients.”
Subtitles (Spanish): “Empezamos con tres clientes.”  → read on screen
Dub (Spanish):       “Empezamos con tres clientes.”  → heard instead of the English line
Voice-over (Spanish): the English stays faintly audible, the Spanish is spoken over it

How a dub is made

The dialogue is transcribed and translated, then adapted so each line fits the time the character speaks. Voice actors record the lines in a studio under a dubbing director, and a mixer puts the new voices on the music and effects track, a version of the soundtrack without dialogue. Each language is a separate audio track.

Lip-sync dubbing, voice-over and AI dubbing

Lip-sync dubbing replaces the original voices completely and matches the lines to mouth movements; it is the norm for films and series. Voice-over keeps the original audible underneath and lays a translation over it, as in documentaries and news. AI dubbing does the same work with speech recognition, machine translation and synthetic voices, and can keep each speaker’s own voice by cloning it.

Where dubbing is the norm

Germany, France, Italy and Spain have dubbed foreign films for decades, and so have Latin America, Brazil and Japan for many genres. Poland and several neighbouring countries prefer a single voice-over narrator for television, while the Nordic countries and the Netherlands mostly subtitle anything not made for children.

Other meanings of dubbing

In music, dubbing means adding or copying a recording; overdubbing is recording a new part on top of an existing one, and dub is also a style of reggae built from remixed tracks. Dubbing someone can mean giving them a nickname, and in the older sense, knighting them with a sword.

Questions

What does dubbed mean in a movie?

The actors’ original voices have been replaced with recorded speech in another language, timed to the picture, so you hear the film in your language instead of reading subtitles.

What is the difference between dub and sub?

A dub replaces the spoken dialogue with a translation you hear; a sub (subtitled version) keeps the original voices and shows the translation as text. Dubs suit viewers who can’t or don’t want to read; subs keep the original performance.

Why is it called dubbing?

The word is short for doubling: in early sound film, a second voice track was recorded to double or replace the original one.

Is AI dubbing real dubbing?

It does the same job: the speech is replaced with a translation timed to the picture, with the music kept. What it usually skips is lip-sync adaptation and an actor’s performance, which matter most in films and animation.

Read more

Related terms

  • Voice-over translation

    Voice-over translation lays a spoken translation over the original audio, which stays audible at a lower volume underneath. Unlike dubbing, it does not try to replace the original voices or match lip movements: viewers hear that someone else is translating.

  • Dubbing script

    A dubbing script is the translated dialogue of a film or video, rewritten so that each line can be spoken in the time the original line takes on screen. It lists every line with the character who says it and its in and out timecodes. The adapted text is what voice actors, or an AI voice, read in the studio.

  • Voice cloning

    Voice cloning is creating a synthetic voice that sounds like a specific real person, from recordings of their speech. The clone can then say new sentences the person never recorded, including in other languages, which is how dubbing tools keep a speaker’s own voice in a translation.

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