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English-language dubbing: challenges and quality standards of an emerging localisation trend

Paper · 2021 · Spiteri Miggiani, Giselle

Summary

The paper looks at the new practice of lip-synch dubbing into English. Streaming platforms, Netflix in particular, created this demand when they began offering many non-English series to Anglophone viewers, and those viewers often reacted badly. The author assembles a benchmark from accepted dubbing quality standards: lip-synch, credible dialogue, image–word cohesion, fidelity, clear sound, acting, voice casting, mixing and phonaesthetics. She treats natural intonation as a separate criterion from natural wording. She then examines a sample of English-dubbed Netflix fiction episodes, first as English texts in their own right and only afterwards against the originals. Duration, pauses and mouth movements are generally matched, though lip-synch is not always consistent. Rhythmic synchrony is the biggest recurring problem. Other recurring flaws are unnatural speech melody and a hollow sound, especially in outdoor scenes. She traces these to several causes:

  • English is shorter than most source languages.
  • English has no settled "dubbese" norms.
  • A slower natural English tempo works against lip-synch.
  • Gestures on screen can clash culturally with English speech.
  • The text work is split between a translator and an adapter, who often works from a bridge translation.

The study is meant to lay groundwork for future research on strategies.

Key points

  • Netflix responded to complaints with fixes:
    • It redubbed the first two seasons of Money Heist with a new director and cast.
    • It restored the original Hebrew audio option for Fauda.
    • Some original actors dubbed their own roles in English, as in The Rain and Dogs of Berlin.
  • The quality benchmark draws on Chaume, Ávila, Whitman-Linsen and Spiteri Miggiani. Intonation and voice performance are kept as separate parameters because they depend on different factors.
  • The main recurring challenge is rhythmic synchrony. Speech melody and outdoor sound quality are further weak spots.
  • English brevity and its many monosyllables make it necessary to expand the text. Expanding is harder than condensing once filler strategies like repetition or discourse markers are ruled out.
  • Viewers who are not used to dubbing may lack the "dubbing effect" immunity. Their reactions may therefore reflect unfamiliarity as much as the actual quality of the dub.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Judge the target text on its own terms before comparing it with the source, so that fluency problems are not hidden by fidelity checks.
  • I2. Split quality into parameters that stem from different causes, as the paper does with wording and intonation, so each flaw points to the workflow step that produced it.
  • I3. The acceptable level of "naturalness" depends on what an audience is used to, so the reference benchmark itself must be chosen deliberately.
  • I4. When source and target languages differ in length, expansion should not rely on padding, because filler words produce unnatural or cacophonic output.
  • I5. An adapter working from a raw bridge translation, possibly derived from subtitles, without knowing the source language, inherits that intermediate's losses.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (back): Score generated or translated text standalone for naturalness first, then check its match against the source meaning graph as a second, separate pass.
  • I2 (learn): Tag evaluation errors by the pipeline stage likely responsible, so repair rules target the right component instead of a blended score.
  • I3 (learn): When evaluating outputs, state explicitly which reference norm (spontaneous speech vs. edited prose) is assumed, and test both.
  • I4 (back): Under length or slot constraints, the generator should add meaningful content from the graph rather than repeated discourse markers.
  • I5 (back): This supports translating through the meta-world graph and keeping source-side annotations, rather than chaining through an intermediate surface text.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of MaltaMsida · Malta29 works · 894 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 870 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Spiteri Miggiani, Giselle. 2021. English-language dubbing: challenges and quality standards of an emerging localisation trend. The Journal of Specialised Translation (JoSTrans).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.26034/cm.jostrans.2021.054

@article{giselle2021english,
  title = {{English-language dubbing: challenges and quality standards of an emerging localisation trend}},
  author = {Spiteri Miggiani, Giselle},
  journal = {The Journal of Specialised Translation (JoSTrans)},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.26034/cm.jostrans.2021.054},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.26034/cm.jostrans.2021.054}
}

References

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