Why don't subtitles match dubbing?

0:00 This video has been dubbed and subtitled into several languages.

0:03 On most devices, you can call up YouTube’s settings, and switch between them.

0:06 And if you do, you’ll find that outside the original language,

0:09 English, the words in the subtitles and dubbing often don’t match.

0:13 Which happens a lot, mostly in professional TV shows,

0:16 and it can be frustrating for those of us

0:18 who like to listen but also use subtitles.

0:21 The short reason why is:

0:23 subtitles and dubbing are usually done by different teams of people.

0:26 But to answer why that happens,

0:28 I need to take you on a journey that’s going to involve geese,

0:31 a roller coaster, and this advert.

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0:47 Now, in most of the languages that advert was

0:50 translated into, the subtitles and dubbing pretty much match.

0:54 In French, Spanish and Portuguese,

0:55 the word order is roughly the same as in English, and it’s a simple translation.

1:00 But in the most obvious Hindi translation,

1:02 the company name sits in the middle of the sentence,

1:05 and standard practice for modern professional dubbing is

1:08 to match lip movements as closely as possible.

1:11 Now, there is a way to rephrase the sentence

1:14 in Hindi so that the company name sits at the end.

1:17 The dubbing team chose that option, and the lip movements pretty much match.

1:21 But the subtitling team didn’t see any reason

1:23 to do that, and so the lines are different.

1:26 In Japanese, which has the same problem,

1:27 the dubbing team instead found a translation

1:30 where the lip movements look close enough.

1:33 But why don’t they just take the dubbing script,

1:36 and then turn it into subtitles?

1:38 Why translate everything twice?

1:40 Well, subtitles have their own limitations.

1:43 I gave the translation teams

1:44 for this video some deliberately difficult examples.

1:47 A few years ago, I made a video on YouTube’s copyright systems,

1:50 and it included this sidebar about a song that I don’t like:

1:54 Maroon 5’s Memories is an infuriating composition that uses the start

1:57 of the melody of Canon in D but never resolves it,

1:59 which means it has the same stuck-in-your-head effect as the jingle

2:01 from Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, and I hate it.

2:04 The modern approach to subtitling in most

2:07 languages is that reading is faster than talking,

2:09 and that even for fast talking like that, you put every word on screen.

2:13 The viewer can always pause.

2:14 But that wasn’t always the case.

2:16 If you watch anything in English that was

2:17 subtitled more than 10 or 15 years ago,

2:19 like reruns on television or movies on DVD,

2:22 you’ll find the subtitles often summarise what’s said.

2:25 Style guides used to emphasise the skill

2:27 in “careful and sensitive subtitle editing”,

2:30 because they thought it was important that everyone got the meaning,

2:32 even if they were a slow reader, because you couldn’t easily pause and go back.

2:36 And besides, why would someone who can hear watch video with subtitles?

2:40 It’s not like we’d all end up with tiny televisions in our pocket,

2:43 or sound mixing changes would mean dialogue

2:46 was going to be suddenly difficult to hear.

2:48 In the original English version of that Maroon 5 rant that I just did,

2:52 I made a reference to The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester,

2:55 which isn’t that well-known even in English.

2:57 So for Japanese viewers, who have probably never heard of it,

3:00 the local subtitle translator decided to remove the reference

3:03 entirely and get the same meaning across in fewer characters.

3:07 Opinions can differ, but I think that’s a pretty solid decision.

3:10 If they’d just taken the breathless,

3:12 high speed performance of the Japanese voice actor,

3:14 then it would have been a worse experience for subtitle readers.

3:17 And well done to the voice actor, by the way!

3:19 That cannot have been easy.

3:21 And this is just to translate one person performing a script!

3:25 Imagine if it was a reality show, with six people shouting and talking quickly

3:29 and stumbling their words and interrupting each other.

3:31 The subtitles would have to summarise,

3:33 while the voice actors for the dub can shout over each other.

3:38 But it does mean that in this case,

3:40 for some Japanese viewers, that reference is lost.

3:43 That’s one of the other big challenges with translation.

3:46 How much do you translate the words versus translating the meaning?

3:50 Here’s another really difficult example.

3:53 “Anyone want to buy some goslings?” “They’re going cheep.” The English

3:59 version of that joke is pretty much impossible to translate!

4:02 It relies not just on a pun, but on knowledge of colloquial English.

4:05 You have to know that “going” can mean “making a noise”.

4:08 You have to know that “cheep” is the English

4:10 word for the noise that baby birds make, cheep-cheep-cheep,

4:13 and you have to know that “going cheap”, spelled differently,

4:16 is slang for “on sale at a good price”.

4:20 I loved seeing the responses from the translators on this example.

4:23 A couple of folks translated it word for word, and just gave up on the joke.

4:27 Fair enough.

4:27 But I do want to highlight a couple of them.

4:29 The Portuguese subtitle and dubbing teams came up with the same joke!

4:34 And so did the Spanish subtitler.

4:35 ‘Ganso’ in both languages means ‘goose’, and ‘cansado’ means ‘tired’,

4:39 so they combined them into the word ‘gansado’,

4:42 and now I’m asking if anyone wants

4:43 the goslings because I’m goose-slash-tired of them?

4:47 Brilliant.

4:47 And both the French and Spanish dubbing teams came up

4:49 with their own puns based on their languages’ words for bird noises,

4:53 because yes, the sounds that animals are said to make differ in each language!

4:58 And I love this!

4:59 This is translating meaning and intent, not just words.

5:03 In case you’re wondering, I did try several AI translation tools,

5:05 as well as just asking a large language model to translate this stuff,

5:09 and as of right now, as of 2023, capturing that nuance, that meaning,

5:13 that performance, definitely still requires humans.

5:16 At least for the goose clip, the translators didn’t have to match my lips.

5:19 But they did have to match the goose’s honk!

5:22 Because I talked over it,

5:23 so they had to go to another bit of the video that you didn’t see,

5:26 copy and paste the background noise and a different goose honk from there,

5:30 and synchronize them up.

5:31 Someone had to lip-sync a goose.

5:34 Beak-sync, actually.

5:35 I— they— they don’t have lips.

5:37 …I don’t think they have lips.

5:38 All of which comes together for this example.

5:41 Last year, I made a video where I

5:42 tried to get over my phobia of roller coasters.

5:44 And, spoiler, I did!

5:45 And just after my terror changed to joy,

5:48 on a ride called Nemesis, I shouted this: Yes!

5:54 Have it!

5:57 The original English is “have it”.

5:59 How on earth do you translate “have it”?

6:01 It’s got no literal meaning.

6:02 And more than that, it’s kind of obscure slang?

6:04 Different people in different parts of Britain

6:05 might use it for different things, and it’s almost impossible to Google.

6:09 In my context, it’s a cry of excitement,

6:11 triumph, adrenaline, encouragement, success.

6:14 It’s the sort of thing that you might yell after your team scores a goal,

6:17 or to cheer on your friend after

6:19 they’ve successfully downed two pints of lager back-to-back.

6:22 It feels very male?

6:24 Very “drunken lads’ night out’?

6:26 I did pass a note with all that context on to the translators,

6:29 but for many productions they won’t be working with notes.

6:31 They’ll only have the original show, and maybe the script, if there is one.

6:36 So, here is that cry in all the video’s languages.

7:04 Subtitling teams have their choice of any word or phrase,

7:07 but they have to fit the words on the screen.

7:09 Dubbing teams can get their voice actors to emote in the studio

7:13 as much as possible… but the lip movements have to match.

7:17 That’s why subtitles and dubbing differ.

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