| Voiceover or dubbing? | Jun 21, 2008 |
Maria,
The first step is to get your objectives clear. Otherwise, the saying "If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there" will prevail.
Subtitling, okay, no doubt about it.
However voiceover, put this way, might mean different things.
One is narration voiceover, which is what happens, e.g in a documentary, where the narrator does not appear on the screen, ever.
Another is the voice-over used when a ... See more Maria,
The first step is to get your objectives clear. Otherwise, the saying "If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there" will prevail.
Subtitling, okay, no doubt about it.
However voiceover, put this way, might mean different things.
One is narration voiceover, which is what happens, e.g in a documentary, where the narrator does not appear on the screen, ever.
Another is the voice-over used when a film has testimonials from too many people who appear on the screen. Let's say that this same documentary is about some place where a few dozen local people were interviewed. If the film were wholly dubbed, this would cost a fortune (assuming, for the sake of the example, Brazilian laws - whereby one same dubbing artist may do one 'role' plus no more than two 'extras' or 'incidentals'), and it tends to take away some credibility, if these are testimonials. So it's common to have these people 'voiceovered'. Furthermore, such ad-lib statements are script-less, unrehearsed, and done by untrained people, so they are the hardest thing for lip-sync dubbing. They inevitably sound 'fake' when dubbed.
Finally, there is the lip-sync dubbing. Artists redo the soundtrack, trying to match-sync mouth movements, and this requires a very special translation technique. Imagine that "customer needs" in EN unavoidably becomes "necessidades do cliente" in PT, so a whole new phrase with the same content and message must be created to sync.
Though it focuses on corporate video, you may find a more detailed description in Brazilian Portuguese at http://www.lamensdorf.com.br/jhlvideo.pdf . As understanding written Catalán is not so difficult for me, maybe it works the other way around for you too. ▲ Collapse
| | |
Login to reply/comment 
Translation news
