Thinking about the word “voice over”, you could think about a lot of things, including dubbing. Let’s try to summarise what voice over is, or not.
We are talking about voice over when we can hear the voice of someone we can’t see. It can be on a screen or on the radio. These recordings are used for adverts or movies, trailers, E learning, phone messaging systems and video games. It can be adapted to a video file or not, for example for radio. For that kind of work, the key is not timing but matching tone with the message aimed to be given. Sometimes it is dialogue of an animated character, but other times it is narration – such as for a training package.
When you talk about dubbing, it is more about replacing the voices of visible actors/cartoon characters in different languages. Here, timings and matching the original expression is key. It is also important to have a script which matches the word length and for best quality matches syllable counts.
