Why word-for-word translation doesn't work

There’s a line I keep meeting in dubbing work: “Honestly, I never planned any of this.” In Turkish it becomes “Açıkçası, bunların hiçbirini planlamamıştım.”

Word by word, that translation is “correct.” But correctness isn’t the goal in dubbing. The goal is for you to believe the person on screen is speaking Turkish. And people don’t talk the way text reads. In speech we swallow endings, leave sentences unfinished, jump somewhere else and come back. A translation made while staring at the written text carries all of that written-language behavior into Turkish. The result is correct, but it sounds like it’s being read off paper — you can hear that it was translated.

So I don’t translate the line; I rewrite it. First I try to understand what the sentence is doing in that scene: a joke, a hesitation, a burst of excitement? Then I think about how someone would say the same thing in Turkish. Sometimes the word order changes completely; sometimes a joke that can’t survive the trip is replaced by one that lands the same way.

Timing matters too. The English line might be short, but its Turkish equivalent can grow. If the person on screen closes their mouth in two seconds and the Turkish stretches to five, the voice and the picture come apart. So I look for short words that fit the mouth, not long ones. Where the stress falls is part of the same job: stress in the wrong place makes even the right words sound foreign.

This is also why naturalness can’t be caught by machines alone. Every sentence needs to pass through a human ear. These days I’m dubbing a long interview from start to finish, and the simplest-looking sentences are where most of my time goes.