Abstract
Chapter 5 presents four empirical studies illustrating the main concepts discussed previously. Game situations serve as the unit to organize the analyzed contents of four video games, in their English and Spanish dubbed versions, rather than using time codes as these cannot be traced in interactive material. Previous descriptive studies in audiovisual translation (AVT) serve as an essential reference, adapting the methodology to the particularities of interactive products. The results show that game action is more prominent in action-adventure games, while the graphic adventure includes more cinematics. The use of dubbing synchronies suggests a relationship between the level of restriction in each game situation and the type of synchrony: the more restrictive the game situation is, the more complex the type of synchrony applied.
As long as a norm is active and effective […], one would be clearly able to pinpoint regularities of behaviour in recurrent situations of the same type.
—Karamitroglou (2000: 18)
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Notes
- 1.
Both authors use video game corpora in their research. Pujol, nonetheless, also includes three movies and a short in his corpus to conduct a transmedia analysis, while Vázquez Rodríguez uses a corpus of ten video games to analyze translation errors. Neither of them used game situations as the unit of analysis to organize the studied phenomena, as we propose here, nor do other researchers conducting case studies such as Van Oers (2014), Müller Galhardi (2014), Ensslin (2012), Mangiron (2010), Fernández Torné (2007) and Crosignani and Ravetto (2011), to name but a few.
- 2.
The terms “mission”, “sequence” and “section” are not used here with any particular meaning in the gaming world, but simply as generic terms used to refer to different ways to structure the game action. In other words, each adventure video game can be organized in different parts, as movies are structured into sequences developing a particular topic or phase of the story. These movie sequences, in turn, can be divided into scenes and shots. In video games, however, no standardized terminology is used to structure the contents of the plot. For example, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate is divided into different “sequences”, as they are called in the game, which in turn are divided into different parts. Each part represents a particular mission or assignment that the player must complete. In Batman: Arkham Knight, the story is divided into “missions” and “optional missions”, that is, different assignments that the player must complete, but they are not grouped into sections or sequences. In Rise of the Tomb Raider, the story is based on sequential “goals”, as they are called in the game, each of them containing particular “missions”; for example, one of the goals is to find the lost tomb. To find it (main goal), one of the many missions or assignments is to find some ruins, another one is to explore a specific area within those ruins and so on. Once all the missions are completed, the main goal is achieved and a new goal is set for the player.
- 3.
The information about Detroit: Become Human is available at https://www.doblajevideojuegos.es/fichajuego/detroit-become-human. The information about Batman: Arkham Knight is available at https://www.doblajevideojuegos.es/fichajuego/batman-arkham-knight. Both were accessed on July 14, 2021.
- 4.
This software developed by Microsoft is included in Windows 10 as a tool to let players stream online their gameplays and record them. It also allows screenshots to be taken and the gaming app Xbox to be accessed.
- 5.
Such minor differences arose when some of the segments in English and Spanish did not correspond literally in terms of their linguistic content (i.e. the source and the original sentences were not the same) due to the arbitrariness inherent to all video games—typically, a series of short utterances are stored in the game code to be emitted in specific circumstances such as, for example, battle expressions or onomatopoeia when the main character dies. This was not a relevant issue for the analysis, as the focus was the type of synchronization and not the evaluation of the linguistic content.
- 6.
The symbol / has been used when there are pauses between 1 and 4 seconds within a statement. Longer pauses are indicated with //.
- 7.
Bold letters have been used to highlight the use of equivalent vowels, consonants or groups of letters in lip-sync examples.
- 8.
Guiomar Alburquerque, the Spanish dubbing actress who dubbed Lara Croft in RTR, describes these expressions as batches of onomatopoeia for different purposes: jumping, dying, hitting enemies and so on. They are all dubbed consecutively without any visual references, as isolated gestures, yet they fit the character’s expressiveness and the allotted time to be uttered, approximately, which is why they have all been categorized as time constraint examples. Her interview can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzyrqin7nwc (Xbox España, 2015) (accessed January 31, 2021).
- 9.
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Mejías-Climent, L. (2021). Dubbing Analysis Through Game Situations: Four Case Studies. In: Enhancing Video Game Localization Through Dubbing. Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88292-1_5
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