Spanish dub is a mess and we need help

General Discussion
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Okay, I know many of you will not care about this topic because this is a English forum, but we really need all the help possible

Anyways, so in the past month, gamers that plays with the Spanish (Spain) dub, we saw that many voice lines or interactions were missing, like for example: lifeweaver will talk in Spanish and mercy will respond in English, or sometimes u are not even gonna hear anything.

So…, some people started to worry about this topic.

A Spanish YouTuber, Jinsei Blackwatch (i don’t put her yt link bc I don’t know if I’m allowed) made a podcast talking with some Spanish voice actors, and we’ll Apparently there is a clause in the contracts of the voice actors’ agreements, which are to protect the actor’s work, so that they cannot use their work to train an AI.

And Microsoft do not agree with this clause, they are supposedly still renegotiating, but we are the CLIENTS, who are seeing and hearing the repercussions. All because a company doesn’t want to accept A clause that protects the worker.

Okay, so with this mid season patch, we saw that lifeweaver has some new Interactions, but they are dubbed into Spanish in a horrible, tacky way, it is a lack of respect towards the Spanish public, they are not dubbed by the same voice actor I guess because there is no agreement yet, but instead of leaving the interactions in English, they put a horrible Spanish dubbing, I don’t know if they hired a rookie actor, or they just have used AI

(You can see all this in a thread made on the twitter profile of Jinsei Blackwatch)

I know, all this doesn’t matter to you, but if we are being affected, at some point the English dubbing will also be affected by this whole AI and corporate mess that only cares about money and not quality.

Pls, help Spanish players to make Noise, we are not gonna accept this mistreatment.

(Oh, and btw, we don’t even have voice/sound for the new Maximilian thing)

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Hey hello. I follow the Italian situation, since I manage an Italian-English audioblog of Overwatch. I’m very sorry about this situation, but I’m curious: do you have some examples to post, maybe a video of these Spanish voicelines? You can post links with the <-> function when you write in the forums, don’t worry. :+1:

I would also like to tell you what I noticed: globally there is a strong problem in the management of the localizations of the various countries. the game is never 100% aligned with the original dubbing, but I also believe that it is a problem that changes in each country and depending on the contractual conditions with the various dubbing studios.

In Italy I think we have several studios in Rome and Milan, and generally the Italian public appreciates dubbed/translated products much more than those left subtitled. However, the Italian staff of Overwatch can’t keep up with the details: we haven’t received Italian trailers since last year (only in season 13 we had something on tiktok, but you can immediately hear how bad the audio mix was, you notice it especially in the second part of the trailer: https://www.tiktok.com/@overwatchit/video/7424814729958329633 )

Even comics and all blog posts that refer to the lore are no longer translated, while only marketing or game balance communications are published. But I digress here, these are texts or advertising videos. or, well… official books not localized in all languiages supported by overwatch game (:pensive:).

On the audio side in game for italian… the situation is relatively good. we almost always have stable dubbing, but since the beginning of OW2 we also had problems with dubbing in English not translated into our language. but in reality the biggest problem was on the technical side :wrench:. some examples:

  • the voicelines were translated in the texts (so it means someone worked on them) but they were silent. probably an error in converting the audio file formats :arrows_counterclockwise:;
  • during the Starwatch event, the Echo 3CH0 skin does not have the robotic filter of Echo’s voicelines, while the wrecking ball dialogues in the game mode mistakenly have a lack of the robot’s robotic filter;
  • Also some audio mixing is pretty badly screwed up on some heroes that have the default filter: the last voices of genji, reaper and sometimes genji have a filter that makes them sound completely different from their previous recordings. I mean in the filter setting :level_slider:;
  • some dubbing listing oversights, like for example mei who while he is punching… wrongly sounds like winston, and vice versa. :sweat_smile:
  • Bad translation checking: maybe some dialogues taken individually actually have a correct translation for English… but are grammatically incorrect when speaking to the interlocutor (you should know this too, English is a language that does not pay attention to the same rules of grammatical adaptation on subjects and verbs, like masculine / feminine or other);

In short, from the recording point of view we actually have an active continuation, but what we lack is the revision process, the care that everything that is about to be sent to publication is really ok. I even released several feedbacks every season in excel sheets, and so far some dubbing sessions have solved something. :mechanical_arm:

But if you ask me if in Italy we have a problem of machine learning… no. Italian dubbing studios have been extremely strict on the subject for years, and even the slightest case of automatic dubbing on a product published in the entertainment industry causes a great scandal and huge media repercussions in Italy :exploding_head:. This is why I think that in our case in Italy we do not have this type of threat from Microsoft Italy. Italian dubbing is seen as an art (we have specialized schools just like Japan does) and unions protect voice actors as much as possible. It is however undeniable that Blizzard (intended well before the Microsoft acquisition) has still lowered the care in localization a lot, especially after the corporate media scandals.

I hope this speech was interesting :kissing:. I await with sincere curiosity some examples, and how the situation is developing in your country. :mechanical_arm:

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Thank you very much about this information, it’s so helpful to know the situation in Italy too!!

I don’t know why but I still can’t post links even with your method, but anyways, if you search in Twitter: JinseiBlackOw

U will see the profile that made a thread with proofs about the lifeweaver situation

I still have hope that is not AI because I know EU is more strict and protects more the actors, but I don’t know, I’m so afraid, they really did nasty the dub of the new interactions of lifeweaver.

In the podcast that the Spanish overwatch YouTuber did with some dubbing actors, they said that about the situation of the really bad sound mixing that started with overwatch 2, is really strange, because they know that blizzard really takes details in the dub, and they as a dub actors don’t even understand why the audio mixing is so bad.

But the topic that scares me the most, is why Microsoft still didn’t accept they clause that protects Spanish dub actors from artificial intelligence. :frowning:

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oh, I assume you’re talking about this clip as an example.
https://x.com/JinseiBlackOw/status/1881847426749022679

it’s interesting, but I don’t know if there’s AI or not (i could be wrong, not knowing the natural sound that spanish should have. I can’t recognize any pronunciation errors. :sweat_smile: :raised_hands: )… but rather a strange change in tone. Usually this happens because of a really long time gap from the last time a voice actor sat down to do a recording session, but i also think it’s the responsibility of the dubbing director or the client (in this case blizzard) to be extremely careful about what is received and if it’s consistent with the game. yeah, well… pretty similar to what i was saying before: poor care of the mixing phase in the final check in of the audio files.

But I would like to give you an Italian example when I talk about how Reaper sounds very differently in the last italian dubbing session:

https://theomnictalking.altervista.org/dialoghi-eroi/reaper/
You can hear the difference between the “anubis” and “reaper” skin sections:

Anubi skin (which is the most recent dubbing, and here there is NOT the skin’s audio filter) seems to have a much more nasal tone, and it is also the same in all the other new Italian voice lines of the pre-match dialogues regardless of the skin.

but surely this is a small thing compared to the Spanish dubbing of Lifeweaver, I can confirm as a novice of the Spanish language that anyway the voice seems completely different. But I also have a doubt: was there a change of voice actor, maybe? it would not be the first time that Blizzard tries to integrate two different voice actors in one language (I think it happened in ow1 with the Polish dubbing of Ana). :thinking:

in the localization section of the spanish forum is there still someone from the staff answering localization questions? or maybe in the blizzard customer support account on twitter? :thinking:

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Hellooo

So i may have some new information, maybe the dub of the new interactions of lifeweaver, are made with a actor from UK, that’s why the acting sounds so off, maybe the actor is not an 100% expert in Spanish(?

But if this is true, Microsoft is doing some nasty work, if it’s true that they preferred to contract an voice actor (that barely speaks Spanish) from the UK so they don’t have to respect EU laws, it would something very very nasty.

About the Spanish (EU) Forums, they are not very active, we do have indeed a section where we can talk about the translations and dub topics, but that section is not moderate by anyone, or at least the post I saw about people talking about some errors in the translation, didn’t have any answers by any moderator, and these posts were made like a year ago…

At least if the UK thing is real, I can relax a little bit bc that would mean that they didn’t use any AI

But idk, we still don’t have any official source so…

I did try to contact the studio in Spain who supposedly directs the dub, but I don’t even know if they are the studio, it’s hard to get info about these things, many times the studios can change or the director can change too

But it would be amazing if the Microsoft or blizzard gave us official info, but I know that will never happen bc this is not the English dub, so we don’t get that many attention

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hey, raffa (That’s how the singer was affectionately called in Italy, you know? :smiling_face:)

I don’t know if your source has a reliable source, but this could explain any grammatical errors for Spanish and why it doesn’t sound so robotic to me. However, it seems strange to me that this type of approach is applied, it would also be complicated for the Spanish team itself to prepare a translation and send it to someone who has difficulty. :thinking: As I said, unfortunately I don’t know how the dubbing world is managed in Spain, so I’m not clear on whether it is handled severely or not.

There would also be another way to officially know if they have changed the voice actors: the in-game credits. Usually they update them at the beginning of each new year, but this year with the midpatch of season 14 it hasn’t been updated yet, showing the 2023 ones (since they were published at the beginning of 2024). I don’t think that with season 15 they can avoid updating them, since the entire netease staff from China will be added to the game. i would suggest you check out the cast page on the wikia, https://overwatch.fandom.com/wiki/Cast and pay attention to the credits section as soon as they update it.

as for the dubbing business in video games i know it’s a general crisis, many studios tend to avoid managing too many localization teams, since they are high costs to maintain in the long term. For example marvel rivals only aims at three dubbings on where the audience is more affluent in competitive live services: english, chinese and japanese, even ignoring french. what i don’t understand however is that a voice actor is paid for this soil in the spanish localization, in one way or another it’s money to spend on someone. i still think that there is negligence in the revision team, a bit like what is happening here in italy.

let’s hope for the best anyway, there have been cases of re-dubbing of voicelines (even in my case in italy, on some recent voicelines of reinhardt). maybe it could also be the case of lifeweaver in spain. :crossed_fingers:

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