Not so long ago, while I was walking to a restaurant to have dinner with colleagues after a conference, I was talking to a scientist who worked for company that develops audiovisual translation and dubbing, using artificial intelligence. He asked me about dubbing, and how one would measure the quality of a dub. What the metrics were.

Now, until I left my comfortable little dubbing scriptwriter cave and ventured into the big wide world of localization, I had never heard of “metrics”. Okay, I had, but not in context with my work.

The way I measured success was by how much (or how little) I heard from the studio when they were recording my script. How smoothly the recording session was going. Whether the director and the voice actors were happy. I also measured success for myself by how popular the film or the TV series was that I had been working on. How people reacted when I said, oh, I wrote the dubbing script for the first four seasons of “Grey’s Anatomy,” or for “Peaky Blinders.” How much those series meant to an audience. And it never made much of a difference to me whether that audience was the original audience or the one watching the dub. My series is my series, in whatever language. Whether it was a nurse asking me what my name is and what I do for a living while I was lying in an emergency room in Seattle, commenting on the realism of “Grey’s Anatomy” when it came to affairs between doctors and nurses, or whether the audience was my godson, just turned 12, in the cinema across the street in an evening show of “Thor,” his bright kid laughter ringing out over the adult guffaws.

“Metrics?” I asked the scientist. “My metrics is whether something works. Whether it hits home. Whether it an audience feels a connection.” He looked puzzled.

Metrics? We were walking to an Italian restaurant. What are the metrics for a good dinner? How do you measure an interesting conversation? What quality standards do we have for the feeling that a nice evening with friends leaves us with?

Metrics.

You buy something and you want to know if it’s good. Or if it works. Or, if you have the choice of different people to buy it from, if someone else offers a better product. I get it. I envision metrics as something that has to do with measurement. And with objectivity. I see charts that show 100% and then less than that. Perfection and deviation from that standard.

But there is also art in localization. At the core of the localization of movies and series, there is creativity. Are there metrics for that?

Creativity is connected to the idea of divergent thinking, that is, the ability to generate new ideas. It’s called “thinking outside the box.” The Germans call this “thinking around the corner”. I like this expression because it indicates something that creative people are particularly good at: Working with things that they cannot yet see.

Divergent thinking isn’t quite as organized as a workflow motivated by getting results and solutions, but it does come up with new things. Replace “divergent thinking” with “humans” and “a workflow motivated by getting results” with “AI driven process” and you might see what I’m getting at.

Humans might take longer, but they are original. Creatives might be chaotic but they are able to connect with an audience in ways that cannot be measured. The creative input into dubbing – to talk about the thing that I know best – has so many different elements (the translation, the script, the voice acting) and is so intertwined with the original that I wager that it’s impossible to ever really find out whether the success of a movie or a series in a foreign territory is due to the dub or not. The audience doesn’t see the two things separately. It just sees something and likes it, or not.

This sounds extremely romantic. It sounds impractical. It’s the dream of a creative who doesn’t have any idea about the business side of localization, or that money and math rule the world. Who says that they do? Nothing against money or math. I wish I had both. But who would really have money and math and not have love and beauty? Who would prefer money and math over community and laughter?

Romanticism is the only alternative to giving up.

In an article in the German magazine “Die Zeit”, Hamburg’s senator for cultural affairs Carsten Brosda describes how at the moment, the only realistic perspective on the current state of the world seems to be that things will turn out less bad than we fear. “But that’s not something that anyone dreams about,” he continues. The idea that it might be possible to join forces and to fight for better times together, he writes, might seem hopelessly romantic. But, “what would be the argument against it, if this romantic impulse can secure a place for itself in everyday reality? (…) Shouldn’t it be desirable to insist on the idea that those are rewarded who are courageous and who dare to develop a vision of the future in which they want to live?” Brosda finds this “not only romantic, but human – and sensible.” (my translations)

There is a place for cold hard calculation. Let’s leave that to the people that do that well. There is a place for perfection. Let’s leave that to the people who want to go mad. Because we all know that perfection is only a concept, that it’s impossible to attain, yet we orient ourselves and our lives to perfection as if it existed in reality. Perfection is limiting because there is only one of it. It only exists once. You can’t connect over perfection, you can’t talk about it. What is there to say? It’s perfect. Period. And then? Especially if you want to connect as an artist, you have to have imperfection. Even if you strive to be as perfect as you can – the way that you suffer from those imperfections is what makes you the artist that you are.

As people in dubbing, we have an unlimited capacity for imperfection. Because a lip sync dub will never be perfect when you look at the measurable stuff. The soundwave patterns, the bilabials, the decibels. We get as close as we can. And the rest is freedom, and it’s limitless.

Let me quote from Bruno Herrmann’s recent LinkedIn post: “Imperfection (…) reminds us about being as close as possible to who we are.” And here is where imperfection does link to the world of math, money and metrics. In that world, if we cannot be who we are, what do we have to offer? What can we sell? If we cannot, as Hermann says “stand out with our experiences,” which are by definition imperfect because they are only ever our own, what then distinguishes us from the competition? If I’m perfect, what motivation would anyone have to engage with me? Why would I play a game, or engage in sports, with someone who is perfect? Where I have a 0% chance of winning? Just about every human activity that I can imagine has something to do with having more than 0% chance of winning, or of making an impact.

Even the world of math, money and metrics would not exist without the unmeasurable, the stuff that defies the zeroes and the ones. This is the value of art, and of creativity. Metrics can only measure what’s there. Creativity can imagine what doesn’t exist yet. And that’s what truly has value – even in the business world.

Guillermo del Toro has said that as humans “have the right to be imperfect.” Because humanity doesn’t live in the black and white, it lives in the grey. And I’m repeating myself, but I would want to add that as artists, and as creatives, we not only have a right to be imperfect. We have the obligation.