Anguished voice dubbing? (mainly for Spanish or German speakers)

March 11, 2025 10:33 AM

I have noticed that voice actors in Spain and in Germany use what I describe as an "anguished" manner of speaking. Why is this, how did it originate? Does it exist in any other languages?

Here are some examples of what I am talking about:

In Spanish

In German

posted by sefsl to Media & Arts (4 answers total)

Heh, that first example is kind of meta, since the woman is talking about and demonstrating exactly this phenomenon of melodramatic anguished overacting in movies, unlike the way people would talk in real life. In both examples you shared, it feels like the women are putting on this melodramatic pose a little bit ironically (though I don't understand the German one like I do the Spanish one).

It reminds me a little of the melodramatic voice acting of girl characters in some Japanese anime—so much yelling and crying and emoting. I hear it a lot in anime for kids, especially, and much less so in anime for general or adult audiences. That's different than what you have here, but it's similar in its level of stylization.

I hope someone has studied this and has more info, but it also reminds me of watching older American and European movies where the acting is more like stage acting of a past era and has its own conventions that now feel a bit stilted and melodramatic. My assumption has always been that this must be a convention in acting in those countries or is an older convention that the actors are referring back to in their manner of speech.
posted by limeonaire at 12:45 PM on March 11 [4 favorites]

I think there are just all these cultural conventions everywhere for how to sound in specific contexts.

Like, in American animated movies people generally talk in a more exaggerated and unnatural way than they would in non-animated movies. (There are multiple styles for this - compare The Simpsons to a Disney movie.) There's been a standard style for TV journalists in every country whose news I've watched. The way people talk in Ted Talks or social media videos or class presentations is (usually) different than the way the same people would talk in a small meeting with their coworkers or a video chat with friends or when telling someone random a story. (Just today I bounced off a few youtube instruction videos because the presenters' vocal patterns felt so unnatural and annoying. I'm fairly confident they don't sound that obnoxious in real life.) I see even little kids in real life switching into presentation mode sometimes and it's really interested - when do they learn that?

So yeah, conventions. Even when there's a move towards naturalism in some contexts (English-language movies and most live-action non-fantasy TV shows set in the present day tend to sound much more similar to people in real life now than they did in the '50s or '60s, and I think the movie speech patterns for 'gently bred young women' were often super weird until sometime in the '70s or '80s) there are still a lot of intonation patterns in other public speaking contexts - including media - that are way less prevalent in private speech, and vice versa.

I do find that in some countries/languages the influence of theater feels stronger in movies and TV - in terms of acting style, writing style, and sometimes overall production style - than it currently does in English-language productions. No idea if that's the case in Spain or Germany, though.
posted by trig at 1:46 PM on March 11 [1 favorite]

Oh yeah the folks in the German one are definitely doing it on purpose too, and it's an exaggeration but not incorrect. I don't know that it's anguished so much though as intensified. "Valley Girl" is coming to mind as kind of being an American English counterpart ("ohmigosh, like, REALLY??") but I'm sure people who actually study it could be much more precise.
posted by teremala at 5:04 PM on March 11 [2 favorites]

I asked a friend who has taught Spanish for a read on this, and he suggested that these specific ways of speaking might be a little bit like British Received Pronunciation, a highly stylized accent that is more common in broadcast media. They might be specific to acting schools or methods as well.
posted by limeonaire at 1:29 PM on March 12 [1 favorite]