Why don't subtitles match dubbing?

This video has been dubbed and subtitled into several languages. On most devices, you can call up YouTube’s settings, and switch between them. And if you do, you’ll find that outside the original language, English, the words in the subtitles and dubbing often don’t match. Which happens a lot, mostly in professional TV shows, and it can be frustrating for those of us who like to listen but also use subtitles. The short reason why is: subtitles and dubbing are usually done by different teams of people. But to answer why that happens, I need to take you on a journey that’s going to involve geese, a roller coaster, and this advert. This video is sponsored by NordVPN. That’s not a joke, this video is actually sponsored by NordVPN, who have been very useful as I’ve been travelling around! Visit nordvpn.com/tomscott to find the best deal they’re offering right now. Now, in most of the languages that advert was translated into, the subtitles and dubbing pretty much match. In French, Spanish and Portuguese, the word order is roughly the same as in English, and it’s a simple translation. But in the most obvious Hindi translation, the company name sits in the middle of the sentence, and standard practice for modern professional dubbing is to match lip movements as closely as possible. Now, there is a way to rephrase the sentence in Hindi so that the company name sits at the end. The dubbing team chose that option, and the lip movements But the subtitling team didn’t see any reason to do that, and so the lines are different. In Japanese, which has the same problem, the dubbing team instead found a translation where the lip movements look close enough. But why don’t they just take the dubbing script, and then turn it into subtitles? Why translate everything twice? Well, subtitles have their own limitations. I gave the translation teams for this video some deliberately difficult examples. A few years ago, I made a video on YouTube’s copyright systems, and it included this sidebar about a song that I don’t like: Maroon 5’s Memories is an infuriating composition that uses the start of the melody of Canon in D but never resolves it, which means it has the same stuck-in-your-head effect as the jingle from Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, and I hate it. The modern approach to subtitling in most languages is that reading is faster than talking, and that even for fast talking like that, you put every word on screen. The viewer can always pause. But that wasn’t always the case. If you watch anything in English that was subtitled more than 10 or 15 years ago, like reruns on television or movies on DVD, you’ll find the subtitles often summarise what’s said. Style guides used to emphasise the skill in “careful and sensitive subtitle editing”, because they thought it was important that everyone got the meaning, even if they were a slow reader, because you couldn’t easily pause and go back. And besides, why would someone who can hear watch video with subtitles? It’s not like we’d all end up with tiny televisions in our pocket, or sound mixing changes would mean dialogue was going to be suddenly difficult to hear. In the original English version of that Maroon 5 rant that I just did, I made a reference to The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester, which isn’t that well-known even in English. So for Japanese viewers, who have probably never heard of it, the local subtitle translator decided to remove the reference entirely and get the same meaning across in fewer characters. Opinions can differ, but I think that’s a pretty solid decision. If they’d just taken the breathless, high speed performance of the Japanese voice actor, then it would have been a worse experience for subtitle readers. And well done to the voice actor, by the way! That cannot have been easy. And this is just to translate one person performing a script! Imagine if it was a reality show, with six people shouting and talking quickly and stumbling their words and interrupting each other. The subtitles would have to summarise, while the voice actors for the dub can shout over each other. But it does mean that in this case, for some Japanese viewers, that reference is lost. That’s one of the other big challenges with translation. How much do you translate the words versus translating the meaning? Here’s another really difficult example. “Anyone want to buy some goslings?” “They’re going cheep.” The English version of that joke is pretty much impossible to translate! It relies not just on a pun, but on knowledge of colloquial English. You have to know that “going” can mean “making a noise”. You have to know that “cheep” is the English word for the noise that baby birds make, cheep-cheep-cheep, and you have to know that “going cheap”, spelled differently, is slang for “on sale at a good price”. I loved seeing the responses from the translators on this example. A couple of folks translated it word for word, and just gave up on the joke. Fair enough. But I do want to highlight a couple of them. The Portuguese subtitle and dubbing teams came up with the same joke! And so did the Spanish subtitler. ‘Ganso’ in both languages means ‘goose’, and ‘cansado’ means ‘tired’, so they combined them into the word ‘gansado’, and now I’m asking if anyone wants the goslings because I’m goose-slash-tired of them? Brilliant. And both the French and Spanish dubbing teams came up with their own puns based on their languages’ words for bird noises, because yes, the sounds that animals are said to make differ in each language! And I love this! This is translating meaning and intent, not just words. In case you’re wondering, I did try several AI translation tools, as well as just asking a large language model to translate this stuff, and as of right now, as of 2023, capturing that nuance, that meaning, that performance, definitely still requires humans. At least for the goose clip, the translators didn’t have to match my lips. But they did have to match the goose’s honk! Because I talked over it, so they had to go to another bit of the video that you didn’t see, copy and paste the background noise and a different goose honk from there, and synchronize them up. Someone had to lip-sync a goose. Beak-sync, actually. I— they— they don’t have lips. …I don’t think they have lips. All of which comes together for this example. Last year, I made a video where I tried to get over my phobia of roller coasters. And, spoiler, I did! And just after my terror changed to joy, on a ride called Nemesis, I shouted this: Yes! Have it! The original English is “have it”. How on earth do you translate “have it”? It’s got no literal meaning. And more than that, it’s kind of obscure slang? Different people in different parts of Britain might use it for different things, and it’s almost impossible to Google. In my context, it’s a cry of excitement, triumph, adrenaline, encouragement, success. It’s the sort of thing that you might yell after your team scores a goal, or to cheer on your friend after they’ve successfully downed two pints of lager back-to-back. It feels very male? Very “drunken lads’ night out’? I did pass a note with all that context on to the translators, but for many productions they won’t be working with notes. They’ll only have the original show, and maybe the script, if there is one. So, here is that cry in all the video’s languages. Subtitling teams have their choice of any word or phrase, but they have to fit the words on the screen. Dubbing teams can get their voice actors to emote in the studio as much as possible… but the lip movements have to match. That’s why subtitles and dubbing differ. And if you want a perfect example of that: …this advert has also been translated into five languages! And no matter which one you speak, you can push NordVPN’s magic Quick Connect button, and your phone and computer can pretend they’re in any one of around 60 countries, from Albania to Vietnam. So if you’re travelling and want websites to stop automatically translating for you, it’s easy! Or if you want to watch stuff from another country, but it’s blocked where you are, you can. (Just check the streaming service’s terms and conditions first.) NordVPN works on Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS and Android, up to six devices at the same time, and there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee. So if you’re not sure: try it anyway. 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