01 · The solution
Dubbing is not a translation.It is a performance, played again.
The words survive localisation. What gets lost is the melody: the pitch, the stress, the breath that made the line sound lived rather than read.
- Subtitles
- Cheap, accepted as good enough. They pull the viewer to the bottom of the screen and cost attention, emotion and accessibility.
- Prosody keeps the viewer on the picture. The voice carries the line, there is nothing to read.
- Traditional dubbing
- Right, but slow and expensive. A catalogue for fifteen markets waits for months.
- Same craft, days instead of months. Adaptation and casting stay human. Synthesis and sync go to the model.
- Synthetic voices
- Recognizable in three words. A demo vocabulary, a laboratory aesthetic. Everyone drew the same oscilloscope.
- Not a new voice. The original one, with its rhythm, its stress, its breath, replayed in the target language.
Prosody does not sell synthetic voices. It sells the conservation of the performance. The proof is never “listen how realistic it is”. It is always “same intention, other language”.
02 · What Prosody keeps
We do not draw sound.We use the trade's own writing.
French-language dubbing has written prosody since the 1930s: the rythmo band, a ribbon of text scrolling under the picture, read by the actor the instant it crosses a vertical mark. Stretched text is a held sound. Tightened text is a fast delivery. The trade was doing variable typography seventy years before OpenType.
- 1The bar
The actor speaks when the text crosses the red line. To the right, what is coming: the notation of the original performance. To the left, what has been played: the target language.
- 2What each variable encodes
Width: duration (ː). Size: projection, a stressed syllable is said louder, so larger (ˈ, ˌ). Weight: articulation intensity. Grade: lip closure. Every variable has its source in the notation; nothing is decorative.
- 3Zero sum
A loop has a fixed duration. Holding one syllable forces the others to compress: width offsets cancel out exactly. That is the adapter's real constraint, not an effect.
- 4Writing rule
In Latin script, duration is encoded by width: the letter is stretched. In Japanese, never: an ideogram has a fixed width and distorting it is a fault. The system switches to aki, the spacing adjustment of Japanese typography.
03 · For whom
Three lines.Three rooms.
Not the public. People whose job is to move content across languages. Each one has a room, a line, and a register the voice keeps in every language.
- Series
- “You never told me you were leaving.”
- Studios and platforms
- A catalogue for fifteen markets, on the screen of the loop. Same hesitation, same breath, days instead of months.
- Training
- “Before you start, check the gauge.”
- Companies whose courses stop at the border
- A course recorded once, understood everywhere. Clear, even, never read.
- Brand film
- “One film. Thirty markets.”
- Brands that shoot the same film three times
- One shoot, one performance, thirty versions that sound like the original because they are.
- Floor
- wdth 72
- Tighter than that, you rewrite
- Glyph distortion
- 0
- Japanese: aki, size, weight
- Promise
- Faithful
- Harder, and true
- Waveforms
- None
- The craft, not the machine
04 · How we work