A Joule is the work done by pushing for a metre against a resistance of a Newton, and a (dm)^3 is a litre, so the units are identical regardless of whether there are conventions for their usage.
Speed is a word generally used for a scalar quantity and velocity is generally used for a vector quantity, ie the direction of the speed is also known. Both can be in miles per hour or metres per second or whatever. Writing units another way round doesn't change them, but there are conventions with ambigous units like 'pounds' where the same term is used for a pound of Sterling silver (£, or a British government cheque for a pound of silver which they refuse to pay up on), a pound mass (ie a number of kilograms), and the force exerted by that mass (ie a number of Newtons).
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I said before that a Joule and a Netwton Metre are the same units. If we look at what that means in practice, you need a Joule of energy to twist something through a dimensionless angle of 1 if the resistance is a Newton Metre. What is an angle of 1? It's a radian, eg a metre of cirumference per metre of radius.
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Now let's get to what I think might be the crux of your question. I'm going to make up figures so don't blame me if they are silly. Let's say a 1 litre single cylinder firing produces 628 Joules. That is 0.628 kiloJoules per decimetre cubed, 0.628 kJ/dm3.
If it is a two stroke engine, the crankshaft would have to turn through an angle of 2*pi for that one litre cylinder to fire. So the torque it could produce would be 628 Joules divided by 2*pi, ie 100 Joules, which we would more typically call a 100 Newton Metres.
If it is a four stroke engine and we are measuring the energy for a cylinder firing then the 628 Joules would be 2 rotations of the crankshaft, ie an angle of 2*(2*pi) so the torque would only be 50 N.m.
So as I see it, an engine giving 628 Joules per litre when the cylinders fire, would give 100 N.m of torque if it were a 2-stroke, and 50 N.m if it were a 4-stroke.
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You'd also need to be certain that volume meant the same in both cases, eg that you didn't have a European measuring cylinder capacity (including the bit at the top) and an American measuring displacement (swept area, excluding the bit at the top), etc.
As you can see from the volume remark, it boils down to what is being measured, rather than the units themselves, and that is something we can't really know from here, but I think Greg hit the hammer on the nail.