“Let’s do things differently this time,” says Gwen Stacy at the beginning of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. The words kick off a three-minute monologue in which she recaps the erstwhile film’s events and anticipates any of the twists and turns of the sequel, all the while playing an increasingly loud drum solo. Eventually, she’s interrupted by her bandmate Mary Jane. “Yo, Deaf Leppard,” Mary Jane says, as a motion to the classical stone band.
You get a different mention if you’re watching with Latin American Spanish subtitles, though. Doing a one-to-one translation would have confused audiences unfamiliar with the band, especially as a fast throwaway gag that isn’t referenced again. So Miguel Reyes Aldasoro, a translator at Voice and Script global Mexico, knew he had a challenge in front of him.
“Without giving any context about the project, I asked my girlfriend for aid to find Latin American bands that had something to do with deafness,” Aldasoro told Polygon. “It besides got to me personally as a drummer; whenever you mess up during rehearsals, people frequently say, ‘What, are you deaf?’ Maintaining the word was very crucial in the context of a band.”
This week on Polygon, we’re looking at how cultural differences affect media in a peculiar issue we’re calling Culture Shock.
In the end, Aldasoro decided on “Sorda Stereo,” mimicking the first wordplay with the feminine of “deaf” in Spanish (“sorda”) and the Argentine stone band Soda Stereo. The reasoning went beyond just uncovering a suitable match. Aldasoro thought the band’s popularity across the region made it a good replacement for Def Leppard.
“I remember talking to the studio that translated Shrek, which included many jokes that are not only local to Mexico but are besides old by now,” he said. “People nowadays can’t realize a mention to a show that hasn’t been on the air for decades. Soda Stereo is simply a band that people will proceed to perceive to, and the translation will proceed to work due to it.”
Whether it’s a throwaway gag or a word change to accommodate a nonbinary character, Latin American translators are perpetually reasoning about the possible impact of seemingly tiny decisions. Polygon late spoke to Aldasoro (Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Dune: Part Two, Oppenheimer), Sandra Brizuela (Gravity Falls, High School Musical), Alejandra Valdez (formerly of Paramount, ViacomCBS, and MTV), and José Negrete (One Piece, Kraven the Hunter, Venom: The Last Dance) to learn more about the challenges circumstantial to Latin American translations.
Image: Sony Pictures
An ever-changing standard
When adapting global media to local audiences, Latin American translators have traditionally abided by a standardized version of Spanish, as the language is far from unified across countries, provinces, and demographics. Neutral Spanish, a word that frequently refers to a version of Mexican Spanish that mostly excludes slang and regional idioms to avoid alienating Spanish speakers, has long been the predominant model, acting as a catch-all for Latin America in general.
Yet, thanks to the expanding presence of social media as well as cultural norms evolving, the details active with Neutral Spanish are constantly changing.
Media Access Company transcreation supervisor for Latin American Spanish Sandra Brizuela recalls how she utilized to have interior debates around the word “cupcake,” which could be translated to “muffin,” “pastelillo” (little cake), “budincillo” (little pudding), or another terms. Nowadays, she says it’s more common to default to cupcake or muffin, despite those being English words, as they’re terms that people have grown accustomed to.
A recording booth at Media Access CompanyPhoto: Diego Argüello for Polygon
“When I started, the thought of Neutral Spanish was very limited, and thankfully that concept has been broadening,” said Aldasoro, who has spent time traveling and seen firsthand how different versions of Spanish are more akin than they are different. “Thanks to social media allowing for more contact with others, it makes it so [it doesn’t feel like] different countries, but almost different cities coexisting in 1 single country.”
“I think Neutral Spanish is something that doesn’t truly be [in the real world], so the language utilized in dubbing [years back] was very limited and didn’t sound natural,” VSI production manager José Negrete said. “Even if it’s OK for all of us to talk Spanish differently, it’s not like you won’t realize it. It’s more about aiming for a good adaptation and transmitting the message of the first source. If we see a movie in Spanish from Spain, there may be 1 or 2 words I don’t understand, and that’s OK. We all have our phones and can Google them.”
Language’s natural evolution has besides led to more prominent considerations around gendered words, as Spanish makes a discrimination between male and female for certain words. As people proceed to fight for designation of gender-neutral terms — which are inactive rejected by the Royal Spanish Academy, despite it recognizing “no binario” (nonbinary) and “disforia de género” (gender dysphoria) in November 2023 — communities across Latin America have been pushing for different variations. Words specified as “Latino,” for example, can be written as “Latin@,” “Latinx,” or “Latine” to accommodate for more than just the masculine term.
As of now, there aren’t set rules for the authoritative translation of gender-neutral terms, with companies having different preferences for each fresh project. For the character of Raine Whispers in The Owl House, who’s nonbinary, Media Access asked Disney about its preferences. The directive was to adapt sentences in a way that they could apply to both the masculine and feminine genders. For example, if individual said “You’re very smart,” the most direct translation might be “Eres muy listo,” but “listo” is simply a gendered word for “smart” in Spanish (masculine, in this case). Instead, the squad would adapt it to “Eres muy inteligente” (“You’re very intelligent”), since “inteligente” is simply a close synonym that’s gender-neutral. In the case of Big Mouth’s Montel, the character being nonbinary was considered a communicative point — story-related elements that must be preserved in the translation. In the end, Media Access discussed it with Netflix, and it was decided to usage inclusive language (in which “e” replaces both “o” for masculine and “a” for feminine — for example, “linda,” which is the feminine form of the word for “pretty,” would be “linde”).
Image: Netflix
The endeavor of trying to break out from the shackles of past language standards gets even more convoluted erstwhile translators aren’t just trying to accommodate or adapt Latin American cultural differences, but global ones as well. Even beyond wordplay and slang, Negrete said that translating from English to Spanish requires consideration of “a different mentality and culture” from, say, the U.S. or the U.K., which can lead to tonally other media compared to Latin American countries.
Both Aldasoro and Negrete have noticed that any companies, like Netflix, have been pushing for VSI to be more active in proposing fresh ideas — specified as utilizing local slang or references, like the case of Def Leppard and Soda Stereo, alternatively than trying to translate global terms, even if not all of them end up working in the end. Others tend to want a higher degree of faithfulness to the first source, usually checking the translation before the recordings take place to make certain they cut words that aren’t part of the studio’s brand identity in use.
“Media aimed at kids is hard to translate, not just due to the fact that you request to be mindful of the language, but due to the fact that there’s rather a bit of wordplay involved,” Aldasoro said. “I’ve had to translate educational cartoons, and you not only request to analyse what they’re saying, but besides certain terms erstwhile there’s talk about physics or architecture. There’s plenty of rhymes and songs. The thought of a kids’ show may sound silly and boring, but the ones I’ve seen lately are very, very smart.”
The lobby at Media Access CompanyPhoto: Diego Argüello for Polygon
As much consideration as the translation teams can have regarding a circumstantial region or demographic, it’s the audiences that yet interpret translations with varying results, sometimes influenced by traditions or what they’ve grown utilized to over the years. Brizuela recalled an “experiment” by Netflix in which the company took a fewer films and asked studios to localize them in Neutral Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Argentine Spanish, and at least 1 additional language. Media Access tackled the Argentine translation of a movie about teenagers, mostly set in advanced school. Brizuela assigned the task to a translator who besides works in a school’s administration and is constantly in contact with teenagers.
“Her profile made it so she’d have a beautiful clear grasp of the Argentine teenage language,” Brizuela said. “And it was heavy rejected locally. People thought it sounded fake or off, you know? Really, even the dubbing actors, erstwhile they had to read certain expressions, they’d automatically thin toward Neutral Spanish.”
The familiarity with Neutral Spanish can be tricky with legacy media, especially erstwhile it comes to comic book, anime, and manga series. For X-Men ’97 and Marvel’s MODOK, Disney asked Media Access to work with Mexican voice actors who had already lent their voices to certain characters in past films for continuity’s sake. For Ant-Man’s character Ant-thony, the studio asked Marvel whether or not to adapt the name to Spanish, yet deciding to keep it as is. In the case of Spider-Man-related media, The regular Bugle is always translated as “El Clarín.” In any cases, translations are determined by existing adaptations from comic books and another origin materials, specified as glossaries, in which certain terms have been kept as is for decades. This is mostly for cohesiveness, maintaining nomenclature over the years out of tradition. This has led to peculiar results, as sometimes English terms might become the norm in Spanish translations, like the case of Ant-thony.
Brizuela besides highlighted songs as a peculiar component for translation, utilizing High School Musical as an example. Adapting a song shares similarities to adapting poetry, in terms of maintaining the rhyme. That’s what fellow translator Lorena Palacios, who was in charge of making certain everything would rhyme in Spanish, did. But the client said that it wanted a literal translation instead.
“The individual who’s listening to the songs in English and understands the language realizes erstwhile something is different in Spanish, so the message should be very direct and plain,” Brizuela said.
According to Brizuela, translation is akin to plastic surgery: erstwhile it’s done properly, you don’t announcement it. But that doesn’t mean that the work itself needs to be invisible. Translation teams aid global media scope regions with different languages. The results frequently make the headlines — Inside Out 2 grossed $102.2 million in Mexico and $80 million in Brazil — while expanding interest in fresh demographics.
But for the translators liable for popularizing global media, crediting can be uneven, an issue resonating across different industries and territories. Video game translators, for example, have been wrestling with credit omissions for years, all the way from Nintendo properties like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to the Persona series. The X account named Loc in Credits periodically aggregates examples of any of the latest games, detailing precisely which localization studios are credited or not.
“I think dubbing utilized to be seen as the last step in post-production of the first task and wasn’t necessarily well renowned,” Aldasoro said. “Recently, the work has received more visibility, including all of the people active in these projects. It utilized to be that only the alleged star talent voice actors would be recognized. But there have been more events, mainly movie premieres planned for voice actors, in which they’re the focus and receive the credit they deserve and should have always gotten.”
To any extent, visibility issues besides apply to the language itself, and how adaptations have changed over time. Echoing the “muffin” and “cupcake” example, any Spanish words have been replaced by their equivalents in English — whereas “historieta” utilized to be the go-to translation for “comic book,” it’s now common to keep the abbreviated “comic” as is, Brizuela said. As such, whenever there’s a case like the “Sorda Stereo” joke, it stands out. It’s how translators leave a regional footprint that will withstand the passage of time, regardless of the changes that will come in the future.
