Synchrony in the voice-over of Polish fiction genres

Abstract

The increasing popularity of audiovisual translation in recent years has contributed to a better understanding of the audiovisual world. Nevertheless, some modalities such as voice-over have not received thorough attention. In Poland, where voice-over is the prevailing audiovisual, one voice talent reads out the entire dialogue list in a monotonous way. The translated version is subject to time and space restrictions, and both the original and the translated soundtracks are audible at the same time, making it interesting to analyze a key aspect of voice-over: the process of synchronization. Departing from a categorization which originated within the field of dubbing, and which was later extended and applied to the voice-over of non-fictional products by Franco, Matamala and Orero, this article aims to assess whether voice-over isochrony, literal synchrony, kinetic synchrony and action synchrony are maintained in the voice-over of fiction genres in Poland, and if so, what strategies are used to achieve this. The corpus is made up of four 15-minutes samples from movies belonging to four different genres: a comedy (Whatever Works, directed by Woody Allen 2009), a drama (Marvin’s Room, directed by Jerry Zaks 1996), an action movie (Spy Game, directed by Tony Scott 2001), and a musical (Nine, directed by Rob Marshall 2009). The study highlights the specificities of synchrony in fictional movies and opens the door for future research into this previously underestimated audiovisual transfer mode.

Frozen Cartoon Film as a Learning Media to Improve the Students' Pronunciation Ability

“…Maybe stemming from the utilization of Benshi entertainers in Japan, who described and carried on discourse during the quiet film time, voice-over interpretation is utilized around the world for narrative and news content. For model, the conventional strategy for AVT in Poland is the utilization of a solitary lektor, a (normally male) voice-over entertainer who gives the interpretation of all characters' discourse, expressed over the film's soundtrack (Sepielak & Matamala, 2014).…”

Untitled

“…Thus, the suprasegmental richness of English, characterised by the different intonation patterns and their functions, the roles of rhythm and stress, among others, are worth researching on in audiovisual translation since these features usually play a crucial role in the communicative value of an English oral text and do not always have a similar realisation, or function, in the target language. In addition, and focusing now on the translation mode which is the object of study here, voice-over, if we consider the oral component and the time limits and constraints that characterise it (Franco et al 2010;Chaume 2012;Sepielak and Matamala 2014;Rodríguez Fernández-Peña 2022), the treatment that these phonetic and phonological features receive in the process becomes highly interesting since it is more than possible that they are often ignored.…”

The intricacies of voicing over documentaries from English into Arabic: implications for translator training

“…"An approximate synchrony between original and translation also helps to give the programme the feeling of 'authentic'" (Orero (2004: 79). Generally speaking, synchrony is pertinent to the complementary aspects of AVT (Sepielak and Matamala 2014).…”