The Anime Dubbing Process: How Voice Actors Give Voice to Famous Characters

As anime consumers, we've witnessed some wonderful dubs... and others that we've tried hard to forget. That quality difference exists for a reason: the dubbing process goes far beyond "repeating dialogue in another language". It involves real-time analysis of the content, proper interpretation of each scene, and even a "cultural adaptation" compatible with the region where the material will be seen and heard. Today, we'll explore a classic anime like Pokémon through the voice actress who has voiced Ash Ketchum for the past fourteen years, Sarah Natochenny.

The Voice Actors You Know by Heart

You might recognize them almost immediately, but you probably don't recall their names. For example, for our Latin American readers: What do Goku and MacGyver have in common? The answer is Mario Castañeda, who needs no introduction at this point. Another simple comparison: Sailor Moon and Lisa Simpson? Both were dubbed by Patricia Acevedo, who has also worked on series like Dragon Ball, Rugrats, and Friends.

Voice actors don't receive the recognition or attention that their full-body colleagues usually get, but that doesn't mean their job is any less demanding. Quite the opposite: achieving that "good dubbing" requires immense work under conditions that some traditional actors would probably not accept. Today we can learn more about that thanks to Sarah Natochenny, the actress responsible for lending her voice to none other than Ash Ketchum in the English version of Pokémon for the past fourteen years.

Inside a Dubbing Session

Her sessions begin with the director (in this case, a woman) sharing all the details about the episode to be dubbed. One of the most impressive aspects is the "turnaround", or the available time to process an episode, which Sarah herself considers extreme, and often she ends up working with scripts that were completed the night before. That means she has no time to study the script, and it's always a "cold and on-the-fly" reading. Her main advantage is being able to watch the original scene in Japanese, which is fundamental to understanding and assimilating the context, as well as picking up details like Ash/Satoshi's mouth movements, when he shouts, when he laughs, when he strains.

Sarah has the task of maintaining a delicate balance between what she reads in the script, what she sees on the screen, and the director's previous instructions. On more than one occasion, Sarah must deliver lines that don't feel entirely natural to her, and more than inevitable, errors are necessary. The video basically shows us three women (voice actress, director, and engineer) putting together a nightmare puzzle, but those who write and adapt the scripts also face a far from simple scenario. One thing is to translate, and quite another is for the new dialogue to make sense while also obeying (without exception) the character's mouth movements.

Fortunately, Sarah and the rest of the team have access to fabulous resources, starting with digital processing. In one of her examples, the dialogue is almost perfect but falls short by a few milliseconds, and thanks to a slight "audio tweak," the engineer manages to make it fit without a hitch. And in another, the script is simply too short, so they have to add something extra. Now... repeat that every day, for hundreds of episodes over fourteen years.