Like in japanese anime how does an English voice actor manage to sync the translated dialogue with the characters?
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They alter the rhythm of their speech to follow the characters’ lip flaps as the footage plays in front of them. The translators do their part for the actors by trying to write dialogue that has the same meaning as in the original language while keeping roughly the right number of syllables to match the lip flaps. It’s something of a team effort.
They’re in a recording booth reading off a script and watching the show play as they read it. Really they just try their best to line everything up and get their dialogue to match the character’s mouth movements.
[Here’s a video showing Pokemon being dubbed into English](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B35E8QleVhg) and it explains the process.
For some languages, it’s a lot easier – especially between languages in the same family. For example, it’s easy to make the mouth movements match with the dialogue between say French and Spanish because they’re both Romance languages and thus the words and sentence structures are very similar.
On the other hand, going from really different languages, like for example Japanese to English, is hard. Often, there will be instances where the the animated mouth movements just don’t line up with the dialogue because the English and Japanese words are too different. Often, the English script writers play with the words to find a translation that will make them match better.
There is a whole team of people involved in this. It all starts with the translation itself. Translating for subtitles or voice overs is an art in itself, since depending on the difference between the two languages the translator might have to take a lot of liberties to accurately convey meaning, which takes precedence over a literal translation which doesn’t often work. But they also have limits, as in they have character limits for subtitles and for voice overs that dialogue has to perfectly overlay with the mouth movements. This means that dialogue might have to be condensed or extended. Once the translation is done it’s off for the voice lines recording, which involves a whole team of people and not just the actor. Outside the booth is a director who coordinates the actor and works with them to end up to the result we hear on screen.
Translation of Japanese to English is especially difficult due to the fundamental differences between those languages. It’s truly amazing that these teams can make it work considering the sheer volume of works being dubbed.
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