Have you ever wondered how English dubs for anime come to be? Because it's a whole process, according to the ADR director of Solo Leveling, Caitlin Glass.
I've been watching anime for years, from some of the best Studio Ghibli films to some of the best anime of 2023. I've been an active fan of some of the newer anime that have not only been released in the last few years (like the epic and intense Hell's Paradise) to those that premiered ten+ years ago (like Attack on Titan and all of its arcs).
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But for some reason, it never occurred to me how much effort went into translating anime from their standard language – Japanese – and bringing it to English-speaking audiences. Of course, there's the legendary battle of sub vs. dub, but in modern-day tech, making an English dub can be more complicated than you think.
Caitlin Glass, the ADR (Automated dialogue replacement) director for the latest hit anime, Solo Leveling, opened up about that very fact when promoting the show to CinemaBlend, saying that to create a dub in today's standards, it indeed does "take a village," and has an intense process:
Well, it takes a village for certain. You need a director to guide it all. But even before I get started there's a translation team and a writing team who do a fantastic job of adapting a translation to the animation. Our adaptive writer, Jessica Sluys. I've worked with her many times on other productions, so she takes the translation and fits it into the mouth animation, and then, when we get it in the booth, if any of that still isn't fitting. I am at liberty to change those things, and sometimes we'll even change them just because they don't feel right. You know we can, Aleks often says, "I don't feel like that's how Jinwoo would say it," and I'm like, "Well, how would he say it?" And so we'll change it to that and make sure that it will still fit that animation.
Aleks Le is the English voice actor behind Jinwoo, the main character of Solo Leveling, and his voice work is often the first thing they always get for new episodes.
Glass says it’s one of the most critical aspects of her job – making sure that all the voices sync in the show even with those changes, because the moment it doesn't, the audiences are taken out of the show and reminded that this animation isn't for English-speaking countries originally.
The director also commented that their ADR Engineer, Jamal Robertson, is also a massive part of making Solo Leveling great when it comes to something "spontaneous and pure" that comes from the voice-recording booth, and making sure it fits with the animation as a whole:
The other person that is indispensable in this effort is our ADR Engineer for this show. His name is Jamal Roberson, and it's Jamal's job to make the gold that that Aleks is giving us with his performance make it fit in in the animation. There's sometimes where it's like something is so spontaneous and organic and pure in the performance. And it's the first take. And we really wanna capture that and maintain it. But it needs to be finessed a little bit. So we can do a lot of things digitally to make the performance fit into the animation that's there, because we cannot change the animation at all. So Jamal is our hero.
The ADR director further said that once all the pieces are glued together, that's when everyone else's voice from the other characters are synched together, and then that version of the animation is sent off to another engineer who works on the sound and effects and all the layers you would expect from anime.
When everything is added in and synched, it is sent off to everyone else, eventually to audiences in America and other English-speaking countries. Honestly, it sounds like something like this – especially with an intense anime like Solo Leveling – takes a skill level I could only dream of. And I am genuinely blown away.
Truthfully, it makes me want to check out some of the other great action, fantasy, or dark anime out there to admire how much time and effort truly goes into this medium.
The next time you check out the English dub of an anime, be mindful of how much effort goes into it. I'm already counting down the days until the next episode.
All available episodes are on Crunchyroll to stream for those who want to check out Solo Leveling in the English dub. They release every week.
