PROTECTING THE UNFASHIONABLE: A DEFENCE OF THE DUBBING INDUSTRY

Dubbing has many advantages, not least the fact that viewers’ eyes do not have to negotiate two different parts of a screen simultaneously in order to follow what characters are doing in one place on the monitor while reading a translation of what they are saying in another. Yet as an audio-visual translation modality, unlike subtitling, dubbing definitely suffers from a certain lack of standing. In this essay, I will examine the reasons behind dubbing’s absence of prestige and, as the title suggests, I will attempt to subvert current perceptions by presenting a number of reasons why audiences might rethink their opinions of this complex translation modality which is both democratic in nature and complete in substance. Dubbing requires little or no effort on the part of the recipient and, as I shall argue, is a quantitatively more thorough translational modality in terms of equivalence when compared to its sibling subtitling that, by default, must drastically reduce the content of the source dialogue.