Dubbing

What dubbing involves

Dubbing replaces the original dialogue with a performance in another language, matched to the picture. It is the most demanding form of localisation because three things have to be true at once: the line has to mean what the original meant, it has to take the same amount of time, and it has to fit the mouth movements already on screen.

Those three constraints pull against each other constantly, which is why literal translation always fails at dubbing. The work is adaptation, not translation.

The adaptation stage

Before anyone records, a dialogue adapter rewrites the translated script to fit the timing and, where the shot demands it, the visible lip movements. Open vowels, plosives and the length of each phrase all matter. This stage is where a dub is won or lost, and skipping it is the reason so much dubbed content feels off.

Casting per market

We cast actors who match the original performance in age, texture and energy, and who can act to picture rather than simply read. For series work we lock casting across episodes so a character does not change voice halfway through a season.

What we deliver

• Adapted dialogue scripts, timed and lip-sync ready
• Directed recording sessions per language
• Separated dialogue stems for the mix
• Full mix against your M and E track where you have one
• A per-language QA pass by a native reviewer

When dubbing is the wrong choice

Dubbing is expensive, and it is not always what a project needs. For factual and corporate content, voice over replacement or subtitling often works better and costs a fraction. We will tell you when that is the case rather than quoting the bigger job.

Send the content and the target languages for a scoped quote.