108 Dubbing The EconomistDecember 21st 2019
21translation. Hollywood used to do this for some films. Bilingual
actors could make this easy: Marlene Dietrich was a natural. Some-
times a new actor would be brought in to perform the role in the
desired language. Some film buffs consider “Drácula”, the Spanish-
language version of Tod Browning’s “Dracula” in which Carlos Vil-
larías replaces Bela Lugosi, better than the original.
This is still done here and there. A recent Indian blockbuster,
“Baahubali” (2015), was made simultaneously in Telugu and Tamil,
two related southern languages, with a cast bilingual in the two. It
was the highest-grossing film of all time in both languages. “Baa-
hubali” was also a huge hit in northern India, where it was dubbed
into Hindi. But with many films from southern India Bollywood
does not bother with dubbing; it just buys the rights and remakes
them from scratch. America does this, too, and very occasionally it
works. Martin Scorsese won an Oscar for “The Departed” (2006), a
remake of “Mou Gaan Dou” (Infernal Affairs), a Hong Kong thriller
made by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak in 2002.
But the heart of Europe, film-making’s home, belongs to dub-
bing. Cheaper than employing bilingual casts or remaking from
scratch, more accessible to mass audiences than subtitling, the
technique had in the early days of the talkies an extra bonus: cen-
sorship. Don’t like the opinions voiced in a film? De-voice them.
While that is no longer an issue, the desire to see American and
British films while hearing your own language remains.
There is also a desire for known quantities. In dubbing-domin-
ated markets, voice artists stay with the same actor, often across
decades. This makes stars out of those who voice the stars, or at
least provides them with steady work. Take the recently retired
Thomas Danneberg. Germany dubs more films than any other
country, and over his career Mr Danneberg worked on some 1,500
of them. He played funny men, such as John Cleese and Dan Ak-
royd, and tough ones, such as Nick Nolte and Sylvester Stallone.
One of his mainstays was Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom he
voiced from “The Villain” (1979) to “Aftermath” (2017).
This might seem strange. If Marlene Dietrich could play herself
in German, surely the Austrian-born Mr Schwarzenegger could,
too. But German dubbing has a reputation for consistency over art-
istry—or authenticity. Mr Schwarzenegger’s Austrian accent
would have been far too distracting to audiences accustomed to a
high German accent. (In his first film, “Hercules in New York”
(1969), the then-bodybuilder had the distinction of being dubbed
in both his native and his acting language, with an American actor
re-recording his English-language dialogue.)Voicing a range of actors has an obvious drawback; sometimes
they may appear in the same film. When Mr Schwarzenegger and
Mr Stallone bantered with each other in “The Expendables” (2010)
Mr Danneberg rose to the challenge by subtly changing his voice as
he switched between them. Now he has retired, though, the roles
have been reassigned; in the German-language version of “Termi-
nator: Dark Fate” Mr Schwarzenegger was voiced by Bernd Egger.
There are other reasons for foreign-language voices to change.
In the third of the eight “Harry Potter” films the voice of the actor
playing the hero, Daniel Radcliffe, had begun to break; that of his
first German to dub the role, Tim Schwarzmaier, had not. Mr
Schwarzmaier was replaced by Nico Sablik, two years older, who
finished out the series. It was a good break. Mr Sablik, at 31, now has
738 credits to his name.
Part of the scorn with which dubbing is treated in the Anglo-
phone world is down to the fact that dubbing into English has rare-ly been done well. In countries more invested in the
art, it is done with care and skill.
Dubbing Brothers in Saint-Denis, just outside Paris,
is a large and well-appointed complex with 14 studios
which are typically all in use. French catchphrases
from English-language films adorn its walls (“Cours,
Forrest, cours!”). In the dub for “The Knight Before
Christmas”, a straight-to-streaming Netflix production
made in English, the actors work in pairs, reading from
a “rhythmoband” which carries the dialogue across the
bottom of the monitor. The rhythmoband’s cursive
font stretches words out when actors should slow,
compresses them when they should move quickly.
Now digital, it used to be a transparent layer of cellu-
loid on which the dubbed lines were written by hand.
If the rhythmoband is computerised, though, the
words on it are most definitely not. Computer transla-
tion is not yet anywhere near good enough for such ap-plications. When two Argentinian films were released
on Amazon Prime’s video service in France with com-
puter-translated French dialogue performed by auto-
generated voices that made Siri and Alexa sound like
Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep, they were greeted with
derision and ridicule. Amazon explained embar-
rassedly that it was not responsible for the produc-
tions; the films have now been geoblocked and can no
longer be watched in France.
In Saint-Denis the director adjusts lines on the fly.
At one point, a mother calls out to her daughter and a
friend playing outside not to go “far away, please”. The
line is translated literally in the French on the rhyth-
moband, but feels wrong. A French mother should not
wheedle her children. The “s’il vous plaît” is cut. From
the mouth of the middle-aged actor playing one of the
children comes a surprisingly high-pitched voice en-
tirely appropriate to little Lily. Between takes it be-
comes clear that that is simply her normal voice. She is
a specialist in dubbing children.
Adapting the script for a new language offers both
technical and aesthetic challenges. A crucial first step
is to annotate the film in terms of the mouth move-
ments, so the new voices look as though they come
from the existing faces. It is not just the number of
mouth-movements—Joe Lynch, director of the “Spec-
tros” dub, calls them “flaps”—which matters. So does
their type. A b-sound, with the lips together, in the
original should ideally correspond to a similar-looking
sound (which might be p or m) in the dub.
On top of this, information may have to be added or
lost. Languages convey roughly the same amount of in-
formation per period of time, but some (like Mandarin
or English) do so with a small number of complex syl-
lables, and others (like Japanese) do so with a rapid
flow of simpler ones. Synchronising mouth and mean-
ing is hard to do at the same time between any two lan-
guages; dubbing between languages at opposite ends
of this spectrum poses an extra challenge.
Then there is the matter of altering foreign films to
local tastes. Irene Ranzato of Sapienza University inMr Schwarzenegger had the distinction
of being dubbed in both his native and
acting languageIn America 36% of viewers watched
Netflix’s most popular non-English
show with dubbing only