Dubbing (also known as re-recording and mixing) is a post-production process used in filmmaking and the video production process where supplementary recordings (known as doubles) are lip-synced and "mixed" with original production audio to create the final product.

Often this process is performed on films by replacing the original language to offer voiced-over translations. After sound editors edit and prepare all the necessary tracks—dialogue, automated dialogue replacement (ADR), effects, foley, and music—the dubbing mixers proceed to balance all of the elements and record the finished soundtrack.

While dubbing and ADR are similar processes that focus on enhancing and replacing dialogue audio, ADR is a process in which the original actors re-record and synchronize audio segments. This allows filmmakers to replace unclear dialogue if there are issues with the script, background noise, or the original recording.

The term "dubbing" also commonly refers to the replacement of actors' voices with those of different performers, typically reciting their dialogue in a different language from the original for international audiences.^{[further explanation needed]}

Films, videos, and sometimes video games are dubbed into the local language of a foreign market. In foreign distribution, dubbing is common in theatrically released films, television films, television series, cartoons, anime and telenovelas.

In many countries, dubbing was adopted, at least in part, for political reasons. In authoritarian states such as Fascist Italy and Francoist Spain, dubbing could be used to enforce particular ideological agendas, excising negative references to the nation and its leaders and promoting standardized national languages at the expense of local dialects and minority languages. In post-Nazi Germany, dubbing was used to downplay events in the country's recent past, as in the case of the dub of Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, where the Nazi organization upon which the film's plot centers was changed to a drug smuggling enterprise. The first post-WWII movie dub was Konstantin Zaslonov (1949) dubbed from Russian into the Czech language.

In Western Europe after World War II, dubbing was attractive to many film producers as it helped to enable co-production between companies in different countries, in turn allowing them to pool resources and benefit from financial support from multiple governments. The use of dubbing meant that multi-national casts could be assembled and were able to use their preferred language for their performances, with appropriate post-production dubs being carried out before distributing versions of the film.

Automated dialogue replacement (ADR) is the process of re-recording dialogue by the original actor (or a replacement actor) after the filming process to improve audio quality or make changes to the initially scripted dialog. In the early days of talkies, a loop of film would be cut and spliced together for each of the scenes that needed to be re-recorded, and then the loops would be loaded onto a projector one by one. For each scene, the loop would be played repeatedly while the voice actor performed the lines, trying to synchronize them to the filmed performance. This was known as "looping" or a "looping session". Loading and reloading the film loops while the talent and recording crew stood by was tedious. Later, videotape and then digital technology replaced the film loops, and the process became known as automated dialogue replacement (ADR).