(Main)streaming English dubs. A snapshot of Netflix’s playbook on dubbing strategies

With ‘original’ content from a growing diversity of languages, Netflix has become a playground for audiovisual translation. Given that Netflix outsources its localisation, it has been able to rely on practitioners in consolidated industries to create revoiced and subtitled versions that adhere to industry conventions. Although subtitling has long been the consolidated mode for localising mainstream audiovisual products (films and series) into English, Netflix has initiated new trends in an Anglophone dubbing industry traditionally reserved for niche products, by bringing the dubbing of foreign-language mainstream products into the distribution mainstream. The illusory novelty of English dubs, debuted at the turn of 2017 on Netflix, has facilitated experimentation in dubbing strategies. In the burgeoning English-dubbing industries, located mainly in Los Angeles and London, standardisation, domestication and foreignisation strategies are being used (Hayes 2021; 2022). In order to elucidate emerging norms in English-dubbing strategies, in this article we present a corpus of Netflix’s English dubs of 82 Castilian-Spanish films and TV series and analyse the main dubbing strategies adopted by the studios involved.