Tangled in Audiovisual Translation: a case study of Romanian film dubbing

At one point Tveit agrees that "an essential part of a character's personality is its voice", which together with facial expressions, gestures, body language and intonation patterns, "contributes considerably to conveying information not only about the speakers, but also about the context of which they form a part". (92-3)
Since characters in animated features are not real, the actors chosen to interpret them play a significant role: their voices, as well as their possible accent and personal speech style, contribute to the portrayal of a character's personality. As one can notice, behind every character there are often famous Hollywood actors. They are chosen by the film production companies to help promote the animated film.
Nevertheless, Disney Animation Studio has chosen the actors for Tangled not by their names, but for their voices. The film producer chose each actor for his/her individual voice characteristics and speech style which would fit the character and reflect its personality as intended by the producer. Therefore, Broadway actress Donna Murphy is the unctuous voice of cunning ‘Mother Gothel'. Singer and actress, Mandy Moore's soft and airy voice helps portraying Princess Rapunzel , who is not the typical damsel in distress, but an innocent, romantic and adventurous young lady pursuing her dream. Meanwhile the witty and charming, but no Prince, Flynn Ryder is voiced by Zachary Levi. Several film reviewers reached the conclusion that this wonderfully chosen cast has brought its enormous contribution to the worldwide success of Tangled and made Rapunzel, Mother Gothel and Flynn Rider to be loved and sympathized by every audience.
Disney characters are famous all around the world. Children can get very serious when it comes to their favourite characters so any attempt of deceiving them can lead to significant decreases in sales for the producers. For this main reason such a wellknown brand as Walt Disney does not afford to be indifferent when choosing who will interpret Rapunzel or Flynn Ryder in the Romanian version. Every child knows their favourite character's voice, so the mission of those who dub gets harder as the producers' standards get higher.
The people from Disney Animation Studio know that in order to have the same successful effect on Romanian (or any other country)'s audience as they have in the US, the film requires a good translation and most importantly the perfect voices in the target language. The replacement of source-language voices with target-language voices is generally made by actors - sometimes singers - which are called ‘dubbing voices'.
Ager Film Company from Bucharest has been providing dubbing voices for Walt Disney's animated series since 1994, being the only dubbing studio in Romania authorized to dub Disney productions. According to the terms of their contracts, Romanian companies have the obligation to find voices as similar as possible to the original ones. To meet these conditions, voice actors are chosen through a very exigent casting, being compared with those from the original version. (Chinie, personal communication, 2013) [...]