When audiences watch a dubbed television series or movie, the most obvious change is the voices. Actors who originally performed the characters have been replaced by performers speaking another language, with dialogue adjusted to fit scenes that were filmed or animated for an entirely different performance. Behind those actors, however, is a dubbing director responsible for helping all of those individual recordings become one coherent version of the original production.
The exact responsibilities vary between studios, countries and projects, and the role may also be called an ADR director, artistic director or dub director. At its broadest, the job involves understanding the original production, helping shape the localized version, participating in casting, directing actors, monitoring synchronization and continuity, resolving dialogue problems and reviewing recorded material. Netflix’s professional dubbing guidelines describe the director as the creative figure responsible for keeping the dub unified and aligned with the original creators’ artistic intentions. In practice, that means the director sits at the intersection of translation, performance and technical production.
The Director’s Work Starts Before Recording
A dubbing director cannot approach an episode as a collection of unrelated lines. Before recording begins, the director needs to understand the story, its characters and the intention behind their performances. Voice actor and ADR director Caitlin Glass has described directing as requiring responsibility for the entire show, including knowledge of the characters and their larger story arcs. Patrick Seitz has similarly discussed the importance of understanding source material before directing, recalling that he watched all 72 episodes of Monster within roughly two weeks before beginning work on its English dub because knowing the later developments was essential to directing earlier scenes properly.
Preparation can also involve reviewing adapted dialogue, establishing pronunciations and identifying scenes likely to create performance or synchronization problems. Depending on the production, the director may participate in casting as well. Casting is more complicated than simply finding someone whose voice resembles the original performer. Age, characterization, acting range, tone and the relationship between the voice and the person or character on screen can all matter. Some productions also require approval from rights holders or the original creative team, leaving the director to work within established casting requirements rather than making every decision independently.
This preparation becomes especially important because dubbing performers do not necessarily record scenes together. An actor may enter a session without hearing completed performances from the rest of the cast, and recordings may not happen in narrative order. ADR director Christopher Collet has described actors effectively performing in a vacuum when they record early in the process, with the director filling in story information that the actor cannot hear from other finished performances. Later actors may have recorded dialogue available for reference, but the director remains one of the few people consistently hearing how all of those performances fit together.
Directing a Performance That Already Has a Blueprint
Original voice direction and dubbing share many of the same acting concerns, but dubbing begins with something original voice recording usually does not have: a completed performance on screen. The character’s expressions, movements, pauses and often mouth movements are already fixed, while another actor has already established the emotional shape of the scene in the source language. A dubbing director has to work within that existing structure while helping the new performer create dialogue that sounds like acting rather than an imitation exercise.
That distinction is important. The goal is generally to preserve the character and intention of the original scene, not necessarily to reproduce every vocal characteristic of the original actor. A director may need to explain what a character knows at a particular moment, why an apparently simple sentence carries emotional weight or how a relationship has changed since an earlier episode. The actor then has to find a performance that communicates that information naturally in another language. Netflix has described dubbing as essentially a second production, with its localization teams attempting to recreate the atmosphere and content of the original rather than treating localized voices as an afterthought.
At the same time, that performance has physical limits. An English sentence cannot continue long after the character on screen has stopped speaking, and a line delivered too quickly simply to match the available time can sound unnatural. Live-action dubbing can make visible mouth synchronization particularly noticeable, while animation presents its own timing restrictions. The director therefore listens simultaneously for acting, pacing and synchronization, deciding whether another take, a performance adjustment or a change to the adapted line provides the best solution.
Translators, Adapters, Directors and Engineers Have Different Jobs
The director is only one part of the dubbing process, and several roles that audiences sometimes group together actually perform different tasks. A translator establishes what the original dialogue means, while a script adapter or adaptive writer turns that translation into dialogue designed to be spoken naturally in the target language while fitting the available timing and, where required, mouth movements. The actor performs that adapted dialogue, the director guides the performance and an ADR engineer manages the technical recording process. Those boundaries can overlap, particularly on smaller productions where one person may hold multiple jobs, but the distinction explains why a dub is rarely the product of a translator simply handing an English script directly to an actor.
Patrick Seitz, who has worked as an actor, ADR director and script adapter, has emphasized that localization is not the same as literal translation. He has also described an advantage of adapting scripts for productions he subsequently directs: if a line proves awkward in the booth, he already knows exactly why it was structured that way. On other productions, the director and adapter remain separate collaborators. For the English dub of Solo Leveling, for example, adaptive writer Jessica Sluys worked from translated material to make dialogue fit the animation, while Glass retained the ability as ADR director to modify wording in the recording session when a line still did not fit or did not sound natural.
The engineer is equally important but has a different responsibility. Engineers handle the recording itself and help make performances work technically against the picture. Glass has described the ADR engineer as indispensable to turning an actor’s performance into dialogue that fits the animation. Current professional dubbing guidelines nevertheless distinguish technical recording from creative direction, with Netflix specifically recommending that casting sessions receive oversight from a dubbing or creative director rather than leaving performance direction to studio or engineering staff.
What Happens When a Line Does Not Work in the Booth?
A line can look perfectly workable on a script and immediately create problems when an actor tries to perform it. A sentence may contain too many syllables for the available mouth movements, an important word may land at the wrong moment or phrasing that seemed natural on paper may sound stiff when spoken aloud. The actor’s performance can expose these issues because dubbing scripts ultimately have to function as speech, not simply as written translations.
Directors and actors can therefore continue shaping dialogue during recording. While discussing Solo Leveling, Glass described actor Aleks Le questioning whether particular wording sounded like something his character, Sung Jinwoo, would actually say. Rather than requiring him to follow the line simply because it appeared in the script, the team could explore an alternative and then determine whether it still fit the animation. That small example illustrates how several priorities intersect in the booth: the revised dialogue needs to preserve the intended meaning, remain believable for the character and still occupy the time available on screen.
Not every production gives the dubbing team the same freedom to rewrite, and substantial changes may require additional approval. Directors also need to keep track of alterations so that the recorded version remains consistent with later dialogue and approved terminology. The recording session is therefore not necessarily the point at which the script stops evolving. It is often the first time every element of the localized performance is tested simultaneously against the finished picture.
One Director Has to Hear a Unified Cast
Dubbing becomes more complicated as a production grows. A series can contain dozens of performers recording on different days, sometimes over months or years, yet their characters need to sound as though they occupy the same story. The director has to remember established pronunciations, relationships, vocal characteristics and emotional choices while ensuring that an actor returning weeks later can reconnect with a character’s earlier performance.
Continuity can involve surprisingly small details. A character may pronounce a name in a particular way, speak differently around one person than another or gradually become more confident over the course of a season. If episodes are being dubbed close to their original release, the team may not even have access to later source material that explains why an apparently minor detail matters. Seitz has discussed this problem in anime dubbing, where increasingly fast localization schedules can mean later episodes simply do not exist yet when earlier ones are being recorded.
That responsibility extends beyond animation. Dubbing teams working on live-action dramas, films and even unscripted programming have to maintain recognizable voices and performance choices. Netflix has cited continuity as an important part of dubbing Korean unscripted series, where the same on-screen participant is consistently represented by the same dubbing performer. Whether the subject is an animated hero or a real person appearing across multiple episodes, consistency helps prevent the localized track from feeling like a collection of unrelated recording sessions.
The Job Continues After the Main Recording
Finishing an actor’s session does not necessarily finish the director’s work. Lines may require pickups because of performance, synchronization, pronunciation or technical issues, and early scenes sometimes need to be revisited once the production has established a clearer sense of its characters. Professional dubbing workflows can also involve creative review of the recorded material and the final mix. The director is not replacing the editor, mixer or engineer, but remains responsible for determining whether the creative choices established during recording survive into the completed dub.
Netflix’s current dubbing principles specifically include adaptation review, casting, performance notes, pickups and mix review among the areas overseen by dubbing directors, with a final creative review intended to confirm that the localized production remains consistent with the original creative intent. The precise level of involvement differs from project to project, but it reinforces how much broader the job is than sitting beside an actor and requesting another take.
When all of those pieces work, much of that effort becomes deliberately difficult to notice. The audience hears characters speaking naturally while the picture, dialogue and performances appear to belong together. Behind that apparent simplicity are translations, adapted scripts, individually recorded actors, technical synchronization and countless creative decisions. The dubbing director is the person tasked with hearing those separate pieces as one production, preserving what made the original scene work while helping another group of performers make it believable in a new language.