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Dubbing, i.e., the lip-synchronous translation and revoicing of audio-visual media into a target language from a different source language, is essential for the full-fledged reception of foreign audio-visual media, be it movies, instructional videos or short social media clips. In this paper, we objectify influences on the ‘dubbability’ of translations, i.e., how well a translation would be synchronously revoiceable to the lips on screen. We explore the value of traditional heuristics used in evaluating the qualitative aspects, in particular matching bilabial consonants and the jaw opening while producing vowels, and control for quantity, i.e., that translations are similar to the source in length. We perform an ablation study using an adversarial neural classifier which is trained to differentiate “true” dubbing translations from machine translations. While we are able to confirm the value of matching lip closure in dubbing, we find that the opening angle of the jaw as determined by the realized vowel may be less relevant than frequently considered in audio-visual translation.
Translation systems aim to perform a meaning-preserving conversion of linguistic material (typically text but also speech) from a source to a target language (and, to a lesser degree, the corresponding socio-cultural contexts). Dubbing, i.e., the lip-synchronous translation and revoicing of speech adds to this constraints about the close matching of phonetic and resulting visemic synchrony characteristics of source and target material. There is an inherent conflict between a translation’s meaning preservation and ‘dubbability’ and the resulting trade-off can be controlled by weighing the synchrony constraints. We introduce our work, which to the best of our knowledge is the first of its kind, on integrating synchrony constraints into the machine translation paradigm. We present first results for the integration of synchrony constraints into encoder decoder-based neural machine translation and show that considerably more ‘dubbable’ translations can be achieved with only a small impact on BLEU score, and dubbability improves more steeply than BLEU degrades.