This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The fire-breathing, breast-baring, skull-crushing monster that is Game of Thrones can add yet another string to its deadly bow.

When the much-anticipated third episode of the final season aired in Spain recently, it drew hordes of viewers. It also gave rise to a thrilling neologism.

At a pivotal moment in the battle of Winterfell, Ser Davos Seaworth looked up from the battlements and realised that the airborne dragon division, commanded by Queen Daenerys, hadn’t clocked a vital signal.

The knight duly telegraphed his epiphany to fellow soldiers – and viewers – with a single word.

“Sicansíos!” he exclaimed, in his best dubbed Spanish. Sharper viewers soon realised that something had been lost in hurried translation and that sicansíos was in fact a garbled rendering of the knight’s original, Geordie-accented line: “She can’t see us!”

Inevitably the gaffe gave rise to a slew of jokes and memes.

“King of the seven kingdoms, protector of the realm and first warrior amongst the sicansíos,” wrote one Twitter user.

“In Spain we don’t say ‘No puede vernos’, we say ‘Sicansíos’ and I think that’s beautiful,” said another.

Rosenrot⚡️ (@Rozenrot) 🇺🇸 SHE CAN'T SEE US

🇬🇧 SHE CAN'T SEE US

🇮🇪 SHE CAN'T SEE US

🇪🇸 SICANSÍOS pic.twitter.com/hU0TDj6vY7

But for others, the blunder was further proof of the strained and demanding conditions under which translators and dubbing artists work when involved with a show as big and as jealously guarded as Game of Thrones.

“You get this kind of mistake when you have programmes with huge audiences – and huge pirating worries,” said Adolfo Moreno, the president of Adoma, the union representing dubbing artists in Madrid.

“It’s a mistake that goes right from the translator to HBO’s quality control people. With shows like this, they want to avoid piracy and that means they have a 24-hour window between the broadcast of the original version and the dubbed version.”

Moreno, who has worked as a dubbing actor for 25 years, said the job seldom commanded Hollywood-sized wages and that, like most actors, he and his colleagues lived welded to their phones.

He said an actor could expect to earn about €120 (£100) for dubbing an episode of Game of Thrones, and about €800-€1,200 for dubbing the lead part in a film.

Andrea Martínez Celis, a lecturer at Madrid’s King Juan Carlos University and a Phd researcher in English linguistics, agreed that the pressure on highly trained but poorly paid translators was immense.

“The translators and the subtitle-writers get sent loads of work and have to do it very quickly. That’s why you get these mistakes – they have only a few hours to do it all. It’s impossible.”

Martínez Celis said the tradition of dubbing films and TV programmes into Spanish could be traced back to the Franco dictatorship and its attempts to exert intellectual and moral control over the country.

“It was a way to censor what came in from outside,” she said. “They dubbed it – and they dubbed it badly – to get rid of all the sexual content and swearwords and all the stuff the dictatorship itself wanted to cut.”

She said the legacy of the dubbing policy was still evident today in those who had been at school in the Franco era.

“In general, their level of English is not very high compared with other countries, and they face an extra challenge when trying to learn a new language because they are not used to it – their brains are not trained for that – and consequently, they are actually afraid of speaking in public in other languages.”

Still, she added, the internet had opened things up and many young Spaniards were now choosing to watch the original versions of films and TV shows instead of dubbed ones.

Moreno was, unsurprisingly, a fan of dubbing, pointing out that it had helped generations of Spaniards watch films from all over the world and develop a passion for cinema.

But the most important thing was the freedom to choose, he said.

“With the platforms we have today, you can see films in the original version, or dubbed or subtitled,” he said. “I’m in favour of dubbing and subtitles. I think that now that we live in such an audio-visually advanced world, people should be able to choose how they watch things.”







