Voice-over translation is characterised by some technical synchronic features (isochrony, literal synchrony, action synchrony, kinetic synchrony, content synchrony and character synchrony). From these, isochrony and literal synchrony contribute to the illusion of authenticity and realism with what is called sound bites (a time span in the target version in which we only hear the original voice, and which can occur at the beginning and/or at the end of the speaker’s intervention). In our study, after analysing a corpus made up of different voiced-over programmes using speech analysis software and a spreadsheet, we have seen that the average duration of sound bites differs from that stated by the scholarly tradition both in terms of seconds and number of words. In addition, we also analysed samples that show no literal synchrony to see how and whether the rendition success of those parts could be affected. The results confirm that sound bites and literal synchrony are aesthetic enhancers which provide voice-over with an authenticity feel that makes it, for some scholars, the most faithful and reliable audiovisual translation mode.

Our study was motivated to investigate reasons why the Spanish localisation of the video game Iron Man 2 (Sega 2010) attracted extensive criticism. Scholars and gamers alike labelled it “abysmal” (Mejías-Climent 2021b, 134) and among the worst dubbing in Spanish of all time in the video game history. This article provides a descriptive and empirical analysis of the Spanish dubbing of the cinematic scenes of the game. We have focused our analysis, firstly, on the synchrony of the 50 cinematic scenes following Mejías-Climent’s (2021b) levels of restriction and types of dubbing synchronies, and, secondly, on the voice actors’ performance (acting, pronunciation and diction) and voice quality (character coherence) for the most relevant game characters by applying the methodology for voice quality analysis, drawing on Bosseaux (2015, 2018) and Rodríguez Fernández-Peña (2020). The results show that there has been a chain of oversights in the dubbing process, involving dubbing directors, voice actors and testers, which likely contributed to the negative reviews of the localised version in Spanish.