Foreign content gets Hindi makeover

ENTERTAINMENT: Dubbing is set to become a Rs 50 crore industry, but margins of the artistes are under pressure.

With over 40 hours of dubbed television content being aired daily on channels like Bindass, Firangi, Discovery, Cartoon Network, Pogo and Star Gold, among others, India's dubbing industry is set to touch Rs 50 crore in 2008.

Three years ago the size of India's dubbing industry was between Rs 8 crore and Rs 10 crore. That's the good news. The bad news, surprisingly, is that despite the industry growth, life of a dubbing expert has changed for the worse.

The remuneration for dubbed work has plummeted by about 30 to 40 per cent thanks to the mushroom growth in shops selling dubbing services. Needless to say, margins for dubbing artistes "" and there are close to 150 people between Delhi and Mumbai "" have fallen.

For instance, if a dubbing artiste made Rs 20,000 for an hour of dubbing work in 2005, he earns just half that sum for an assignment of similar duration today.

Incidentally, dubbing of a television show or a feature film involves translation of the script into Hindi (or any other Indian language), finding the right voices for the characters and recording studios, among others.

Brij Lal Sharma is one such specialised dubbing artiste who lives in Mumbai. Sharma has taken about 40 per cent hit in his dubbing fees even though more channel are taking to dubbing foreign content in Hindi.

"Agreed, there is more dubbing work these days compared to, say, three years ago. But because of the growing demand, all sorts of people have set up their dubbing shops. They are ready to work for a very small fee because of which experts like us have to suffer," Sharma says.

According to media industry sources, the fees for 30 minutes of dubbing work for a television serial involving 8 to 10 characters should be about Rs 50,000-Rs 60,000.

But because of increased supply of artistes, the actual fees has come down by close to 50 per cent while the fixed costs like studio rents, translator and scriptwriter fees have remained the same.

"This has eroded our margins," says Sunder Lal, another dubbing artiste working for a small firm said. This, according to industry sources, has also resulted in far inferior quality of dubbed work going on air.

Disagrees Rajeev Chakrabarti, business head for Sahara's new channel Firangi: "We have strict quality control on the dubbed content as our content is sourced from Brazil and Mexico. These are not English language shows so we have to be extremely careful of the translations, scripting and the voices."

But media industry observers say that very few TV networks maintain the quality of dubbing. Of course, broadcasters refute the charge.

"Sometimes, in order to contextualise the dialogues that are in a foreign language, we use our editorial judgment. Viewers who are familiar with that particular language may not agree or approve of the translation. But that does not mean that we are airing sub-standard dubbed content," says a senior programming executive of Star Gold.

According to sources, Firangi channel is shelling out about Rs 7-10 crore towards the dubbing of its television shows that will run for 6-8 months.

Similarly, Bindass, a youth entertainment channel from the UTV group which also dubs 70 per cent of the content that it airs, has spent Rs 5-8 crore towards dubbing.