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.

KEYWORDS:

• Orality
• dubbing
• naturalness
• fictional dialogue
• translation technology
• corpora

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The symbol DE (De Espaldas), used in many dubbing studios in Spain, means that Frank is initially with his back to the camera and then out of shot (FP: Fuera de Plano in Spanish).

2. TM systems compare the new source segments to be translated with the information available in the TM and present the user with different types of matches. While an ‘exact match is 100% identical to the segment that the translator is currently translating, both linguistically and in terms of formatting’ (Bowker 2002, 95), a fuzzy match ‘retrieves a segment that is similar, but not identical, to the new source segment’ (ibid, 99). TM systems can also compare fragments within a segment and therefore retrieve sub-segment or fragment matches. In Figure 4, for instance, when translating the segment ‘Oh my God, your mother!’, the first part of the segment, ‘Oh my God’ is retrieved as a fragment match.