Today in behind the scenes of movies, we invite you to delve into the origins of dubbing. When and where did it start? These are the questions that may arise when we think about the history of this tool needed for the cinema to reach various parts of the world.
What is dubbing? It is a process where voices are recorded and replaced for cinema or TV. The aim of this technique is to replace the voices of the original language with voices of another language so that the content is widely spread and reaches different countries.
Dubbing was performed for the first time in a movie several years after the invention of sound films since the previous ones were silent and did not require any translation except for some cards with dialogues or titles. In 1928, Paramount tried it for the first time by dubbing The Night Flyer into German. The first Spanish dubbing took place with Devil and the Deep (1933). At that time, the dubbing process was complex: professionals had to remember long pages of dialogue and synchronize them with the actors' lip movements, so they had to rehearse over and over again.
Dubbing was a widespread practice in Spain in 1932. After the Spanish Civil War, it was reinforced by a regulation enacted by Franco’s Government in 1941. This was an initiative to protect the national language, but also to censor or modify dialogues. On the other hand, dubbing began in Latin America at the height of the golden age of Mexican cinema. Another Latin American country that started dubbing was Argentina with the film Dumbo.
Nowadays the dubbing process is much simpler due to technological advances and the digital world. Recordings can be made with fragments or shorter takes, where the dialogue is segmented into small fragments that the actors record while reading from behind a lectern and after having memorized the rhythm and pauses of the original dialogue.
And you, are you an original language team or a dubbing team?
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