How Movies Are Dubbed

Blockbuster movies are often released in several nations at once, and we are used to selecting from several languages on DVDs by now. How much work goes into making other languages work in film? Slate explains how they do it.
The foreign actors' voices have to match the age, texture, and comedic sense of the original. For a big celebrity such as Johnny Depp or Jim Carrey, a single actor in each country will dub all of the star's films. Koichi Yamadera, for instance, is the official Jim Carrey of Japan. Studios also sometimes employ local celebrities, like when Disney hired the French singer Charles Aznavour to do the voice of Ed Asner's protagonist in the movie Up. On rare occasions, the original actor will do the dubbing himself. Viggo Mortensen speaks Spanish, so he did a Spanish dub for Hidalgo. For the Castilian dub of G-Force, Penélope Cruz was unavailable, so her sister, Monica Cruz, got the job instead.

The mechanics of the process are also explained, as well as tricks some voice actors use to tweak their performance. Link

I did the English language dub for a Korean film years ago, and it was just chaos. Ten of us all in one room, doing mass voicework while the work print rolled. We ended up making up dialog to match the moving mouths, but the producer was happy.

(If you ever rent "Emma in Paris", I'm the voice of the French woman.)
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I am from the Czech Republic and we have a special approach to dubbing here. The dubbing is done by movie/theatre actors who are chosen to do the job according to how much they resemble the foreign actors in appearance.
This is a website showing the faces matched:
http://info-koktejl.cz/hudba-film-kultura/dabing/dabing-aneb-kdo-koho-mluvi/

at the end of the article there are three links you can click on - they take you through the next three parts of the photoseries. Enjoy (not many blacks in CZE, though:-)
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