The accent of others

In 2000, a family doctor was the series of the moment. Thanks to a weekly average that exceeded 7 million viewers, the production of Gloomed managed to establish the bases of what would be the Spanish series for the whole family of the following decade. Despite the title, fiction was not set in a health center in the style of the pharmacy in Guardian Pharmacy. The series starring Emilio Aragon made the Martín's family home a nerve center from which different plots led to children, adults or grandparents. And inside the house, the place where the plots and the characters crossed again and again was the kitchen. Specifically, Juan's kitchen. Interpreted by Madrid's actress and comic Luisa Martín, Juan was the family cleaner and cook Obviously its humble origin. Grace, to put it in another way, is that Juan was poor and Andalusian. That Juan was a cat eta. Family doctor is an excellent example to demonstrate the class use of accents in Spanish fiction because Juan is not, in reality, the only character that has an accent. Julio, played by Francis Lorenzo, uses unintentionally, but regularly, he leaves Galician of the actor. But no one laughs here, and it is because the character is Madrid and the same social class as the rest of the protagonists. Julio's speech passes under the radar because his presence is casual and not one of the elements that the plot wants to point out. Because if there is something to which fiction has accustomed us in Spain, it is that the presence of an accent is something to justify.

The reasons why it is difficult to find different accents in Spanish cinema and television (also in video games) start from economic, ideological and social premises that are feedback and adapt to the times. Some of the first reasons stated to eliminate both co-official languages and dialects and regional brands of television cover the Francoist desire to artificially create a unified Spanish culture and identity capable of appealing equally to the millions of inhabitants of the country. If, as the doctor in Hispanic Philology Florentino Parades García points to destroy your social credit. The rejection shown by newborn television towards the different forms of regional expression was relatively well received because the film industry had raided the way trying to find a unique size with which to reduce dubbing work in Spain and Latin America. One of these solutions-not the only one-is known as neutral Spanish, an invention devised in 1928 with the objective that the same dubbing could work in all Spanish-speaking countries. In the case of Disney, and as Montserrat Mendoza explains in his study on dubbing, this pro-government also tried to create a quality standard that the public could unequivocally relate to the mouse house.

Although the search for phonetic homogeneity was set aside in the 90 He had accustomed the artificial Spanish of dubbing and the artificial pronunciation of the actors. For many communication professionals of the moment, introducing accents again could cause a slight dissonance in the public to a frontal rejection of the work. For that reason, and while the presenters struggled in their diction classes, the endangers and the translators began to create-both consciously as unconsciously-an artificial language later called Dubbed. The Debbie tried to find common solutions to very widespread problems in the field of translation and dubbing and, especially, of dubbing from English, inventing alternatives for common American expressions that will work well with the movement of lips we see on the screen. One of the best known words of DuBose is black, a term that sought to adapt the N-Word both in its use within the racist hate discourse and in its reappropriation by the African-American community. The problem is that black, although now it can be used as a racist insult due to its popularization in films, it is not a word that has the horrific historical connotations of the original, nor does it enjoy the variations it has suffered within AVE. In the end, Dubbed has, such as dubbing itself, advantages and inconveniences and while facilitating immersion helps people who do not know English can enjoy cinema in the same way as native speakers. However, it also eliminates or transforms a good part of the context of the work, polishing many of its edges and making it more homogeneous in terms of representation. Because the dubbing not only eliminates accents and dialects-from the AVE to the Italian American, going through those of the country-but also creates a reality in which the protagonists of the stories always speak like most while the accents are a thing of« the others.

In Spain, the problem around the representation of the accents did not end, much less, with a family doctor. In 2014, eight Basque surnames made an obvious distinction between the funny characters, who spoke with an accent, such as Dani Rivera and Karma Elevated, and those serious characters, such as Clara Ago, which despite being equally Basque that his father uses the artificial speech that presenters and interpreters normally learn. This same year, the series if I had known, set in Seville, only admits the accent of the city in waiters, cleaner and criminals, separating its protagonists, Andalusian's, of all stereotypes associated with the way of expressing itself in the city originally. Obviously, the dubbing of video games has inherited all these trends around the way in which it is spoken in fiction. The protagonists of video games sound as professional dubbing actors, their expressions (let's get out of here) continue to play DuBose and the accents are even eliminated when they are marked in the original. For this reason, that the location of the texts in the games without dubbing does have taken into account on multiple occasions the different ways of speaking seems a break that, of course, must be celebrated. That does not mean that on many occasions it remains reductionist, when it does not support stereotypes.

Dragon Quest is one of those sagas that has historically maintained the diversity of accents and ways of speaking in its location. Of course, it makes sense that in a diverse world, where we find different architectural styles and different meals and ways of dressing, the inhabitants of separate territories express themselves in concrete ways that, returning to the words of Parades García, identifies them as members of their social group. Nor does it seem bad idea that these ways of speaking are inspired by real accents-to seem in Japanese also-, serving to make visible leave in contexts that, due to the fantastic setting, leave what we used to. However, here is the general problem of making the accents one thing of others, a feature that the characters that look different from the protagonist and that live in distant places have. In short, a characteristic that produces otherness. It is also evident that the way in which it is selected what type of accent is represented in each area is a delicate theme that takes place through the fine line that separates the social reality from the stereotype. We could say, for example, that the decision to use the Asturian accent when locating the speech of an area where mining is the main economic activity makes contextual sense in Spain. However, the historical invisibility of speech of the area, together with the fact that this accent only appears in fiction to be linked to the miners, ends up being reductionist and loading again all attempts to introduce the diversity of speech in a way natural.

But Sentiment demonstrates that there are still unexplored paths. The Obsidian game, set in the 16th century, uses different visual resources to represent diversity at the origin and educational level of its characters, also of its protagonist, without falling into classism. The first expressive level is that of the use of the typography that moves between the elaborate Gothic letters that identify the most educated religious to the printing characters that are used in the dialogues of the most cultured and modern family of the people. Two of the most interesting details at this level are the fact that typography adapts to the evolution of the characters (for example, to the fact that they learn to read) in a reflection of speech transformation during the course of life, and also that in the same social group such as that of the religious we can see a lot of different typefaces (origins) while in that of the nobles or in that of the peasants there is an almost total uniformity. Perhaps it could be argued that the fact that the fonts of educated or wealthy characters are more elaborate than those of the peasants can have a class reading. However, it is important to note that the most careful typefaces, in this case, are clearly more difficult to read and are more obsolete, which disables any mouth stretch on the way of speaking peasant. The second level in the expressiveness of the texts goes through the use of specific animations and sounds to reflect certain cadences in speech or even moods. The text balloon of an angry character will appear full of small spots of ink as if it had been written in a hurry, carelessly, and tightening the pen too much. A nervous character will make failures when expressing themselves, that we will see as typographic errors that will be corrected in order inside the sandwich. Even the use of color, specifically green and blue, point to fears, traditions and beliefs of the speaker, always in the shadow of the solemnity of the red that represents the enormous weight of Catholicism.

But although the vast majority of solutions proposed by Sentiment can be applied more or less easily to video games developed in Spain that are interested in reflecting the heterogeneity of speech, it is evident that they cannot solve the historical problem of representation in terms of the accents we have at the level of location and dubbing. In the first place because both groups of professionals must reconcile the base material with the expectations of the players and, although the original game incorporates accents of all kinds, the Spanish public does not have the habit of detecting them. At this time it would be unthinkable, for example, to use the accent of Malaga to reflect the southern leave that Joel has in The Last of Us or resorting to a Valleys actress to understand the peculiarities of the Cockney accent with which to tracer. And, in the same way, the locators of the texts cannot make final decisions about whether it adapts a specific accent nor can they resort to solutions that do not exist as a basis such as typographies differences or Pentiment-style animations. Despite all this, it is still interesting to notice everything that by tradition and ideology we are still missing today. Sentiment reminds us that the accents and the different forms that speech takes are part of the identity of the characters and can (and should) be used as a narrative tool. It reminds us that there is something that has been stolen. But also, and with a lot of ingenuity, he points out that there are still roads with which we could recover it.