From screen to game: Translating Iron Man 2 cinematics into Spanish

Abstract

This article presents a descriptive empirical study of the Spanish translation of the video game Iron Man 2 (Sega 2010) in reference to its 50 cinematic sequences and its intertextual consistency across other Iron Man and related texts in the Marvel universe of movies and comic books. We used Rabadán’s (1991) translemic analysis model to analyze the translation while Vázquez Rodríguez’s (2016) taxonomy was applied to evaluate translation errors found in the dialogue script. The analysis shows that roughly one in five of the cinematic scenes contains translation errors. In addition, we have identified intertextual discrepancies of certain key names in Spanish, which, we argue, could disrupt the game’s enjoyability. Without access to the exact situational contexts we can only assume a breakdown in the work process, involving translators, dubbing directors, sound engineers, and QA testers. Additionally, our findings suggest the importance of overseeing the intertextual dimension across the transmedia franchises for coherent storytelling.