Translating reality TV into Spanish: when fast-food TV challenges AVT conventions

In Spain, as in other countries, reality TV seems to be a pervasive phenomenon, materialised in a myriad of domestic and foreign productions. The latter require interlingual translation, which in most cases takes the form of voice-over translation. Despite the prevalence of reality TV and voice-over translation in Spanish television, both fields are still widely underexplored. This article sets out to bridge this research gap by presenting an exploratory study of the translation of reality TV in Spain. To this end, it will first document the prevalence of foreign reality TV in Spanish TV schedules, to then explore the similarities and differences in traditional voice-over translation (i.e. used for documentary translation) versus voice-over translation for reality TV. The focus is on the different types of synchrony observed in voice-over translation, yet the discussion highlights other relevant issues (e.g. approaches to the translation of semi-spontaneous speech) and illustrates how this genre is challenging audiovisual translation (AVT) conventions, as well as blurring the boundaries between AVT modes