AUTOMATIC DUBBING IN TRANSLATOR TRAINING
AUTOMATIC DUBBING IN TRANSLATOR TRAINING

Summary/Abstract: The current study wishes to explore the quality and accuracy of the automatic dubbing (from English into Italian) of a 3-minute extract of an American film featuring humorous language and puns. At the same time, it is aimed at verifying the pedagogical potentials of exposing students in Translation Studies to scenes from an original film version, the related automatically generated dubbing, and the official dubbing into Italian. To this aim, this paper presents and discusses a lesson with Bachelor students in Translation Studies. During the lesson, the participants viewed the film extract in the official language and in two automatically dubbed versions. They discussed language failures and shortcomings, and tackled them. Afterwards, they were exposed to the official film dubbing extract, thereby noticing and comparing L1/L2 features, probably improving translation skills, and fostering critical analysis competences. The findings indicate several language and dubbing shortcomings, ranging from flat and monotonous voices, wrong male/female voice production, to instances of hallucinations. Minor, albeit still compelling, issues revolve around wrong forms of address or deference, lexical inaccuracies, and awkward language patterns. Despite such infelicities, the lesson revealed its high pedagogical potential. Namely, the dubbing shortcomings contributed to raising the students’ L1/L2 awareness. At the end of the lesson, participants filled in a quality questionnaire, which showed the students’ engagement in the activities, and it confirmed literature findings on the existing hurdles characterising automatic dubbing.

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