An analysis of the Spanish dubbing of the video game Iron Man 2

Abstract

Abstract 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.