Global Voices, Local Losses: The Quality Assessment of AI-generated Dubbing on the YouTube channel ‘Vlad’
Öz
AI-generated dubbing on YouTube has enabled fast, scalable multilingual content distribution, yet raises serious concerns about cultural manipulation, ideological reframing, and narrative control. With an emphasis on changes in tone, pragmatics, comedy, and cultural references, this study explores how AI-generated dubbing on YouTube shapes meaning. AI-generated dubbing often prioritizes just lip-sync accuracy and serving multiple language options to viewers over cultural integrity, leading to errors in meaning while supporting commercial goals, such as reaching more followers and encouraging them to subscribe to the channel. In line with this fact, the current study aims to examine how AI-generated dubbing affects cultural representation by conducting a qualitative review of data derived from purposive sampling of Turkish dubbing translations from the children’s content channel ‘Vlad’. The data derived from the study is classified according to recurring patterns under Larson’s Meaning-based Translation Quality Assessment (TQA) model. Meaning, purposefully selected samples are classified in the frame of five error types: (1) semantic inaccuracies, (2) pragmatic mismatches, (3) omissions and additions, (4) audiovisual misalignment, and (5) speech synthesis-related problems, which align with Larson’s criteria for evaluating translation quality, including accuracy, naturalness, and clarity. This study contributes to the growing conversations in audiovisual translation and digital media ethics by situating AI dubbing within broader discourses on cultural manipulation and emphasizing the need for critical frameworks and human intervention in AI-mediated cultural transfer processes.
Anahtar Kelimeler
Kaynakça
- Aluvihara, S., Pestano-Gupta, F., Alqasi, N., Al-Ani, I., Karimkhani, M., Radfar, M., . . . Hamdi, M. (2025). The importance of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in modern science, engineering, and technological research and innovations: A review. American Journal of Artificial Intelligence, 9(2), 229–241. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ajai.20250902.23 google scholar
- Amazon. (2025). Prime Video tests AI-powered dubbing in English and Spanish. Amazon News. Retrieved from https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/entertainment/prime-video-ai-dubbing-english-spanish google scholar
- Balakrishnan, J., & Griffiths, M. D. (2017). Social media addiction: What is the role of content in YouTube? Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 6(3), 364–377. https://doi.org/10.1556/2006.6.2017.058 google scholar
- Bar, S., Barzilai, A., Elias, I., Fink, M., Frumar, J., Ho, H., . . . Tavory, R. (2009). YouTube’s collaborative annotations. In WEBCENTIVES ‘09: 1st International Workshop on Motivation and Incentives. Retrieved from https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/36735.pdf google scholar
- Brannon, W., Virkar, Y., & Thompson, B. (2023). Dubbing in practice: A large-scale study of human localization with insights for automatic dubbing. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 11, 419–435. google scholar
- Chaume, F. (2020). Audiovisual translation: Dubbing. Routledge. google scholar
- Çavuşoğlu, E. (2023). Is Shrek Still Funny in Turkish? An Analysis of The Strategies Employed During The Turkish Dubbing Translation of Humor in The Animated Film Shrek. IU Journal of Translation Studies, 19, 95-106. https://doi.org/10.26650/iujts.2023.1362904 google scholar
- DeepL. (n.d.). Retrieved June 3, 2026, from https://www.deepl.com/en google scholar
Ayrıntılar
Birincil Dil
İngilizce
Konular
Çeviri ve Yorum Çalışmaları
Bölüm
Araştırma Makalesi
Yayımlanma Tarihi
30 Haziran 2026
Gönderilme Tarihi
12 Mayıs 2026
Kabul Tarihi
4 Haziran 2026
Yayımlandığı Sayı
Yıl 2026 Sayı: 24