Synchrony in the voice-over of Polish fiction genres

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.