by Ana Gabriela González Meade
Working for quality trend-setting streaming services providers⏤ and their major fulfillment partners⏤ to deliver quality translation products for the content they provide on their platforms, which includes dubbing as much as subtitling, has never been as challenging and demanding for audiovisual linguists. This session aimed to explain how they have been raising quality of dubbing products by using their experienced subtitling language pools to level the field and bridge the gap between translation and adaptation within acceptable linguistic standards and how linguists on those pools can up their game with the required skills to perform quality checks on dubbing assets as well.
The same jobs up for subtitling translation or qc, undergo two types of dubbing QC:
- Preliminary QC where the background sounds, the sound effects and the music tracks are taken out so that only the recorded character voices track is left on it.
- Final QC is the one that has undergone preliminary QC and has been cleared for final mix with the rest of the auditory tracks.
Subtitlers have working aptitudes that facilitate the training process for them to become dubbing QC’ers, such as timing expertise, text condensation, syntax, collocation, and idiomatic writing skills.
A useful approach for this training is weighing up subtitling QC against dubbing QC and focusing on the latter’s main considerations and linguistic dimension special features.
There are shared elements between the two such as error codes flagging, consistency across KNP and reference or timing whereas other elements such as phonetic and utterances duration synchronies are unique to dubbing and therefore should be thoroughly learned. This presentation introduces these new challenges and includes tips for subtitlers to become proficient dubbing QC’ers.
