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Dubs and subtitles work under different constraints

Watch a foreign-language film with both the English dub and the English subtitles turned on at the same time, and you will quickly notice that the spoken words and the printed text may not match. That isn't a mistake: the dub translator has to fit the performance, mouth movements, and available time, while the subtitle translator has to condense sentences so viewers can read them in the time available on screen.

5–7 min

Questions you could explore

  • How does a lip movement constrain a translation differently from a line of text?
  • Why should captions based on a dub be distinguished from subtitles translated separately?

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Dubs and subtitles work under different constraints | Speech Topic | speaking.app