When The Eternaut premiered on Netflix, it arrived as a cultural landmark in motion. Originally a cult Argentine comic from the 1950s by Héctor Germán Oesterheld, the story was reimagined for a worldwide audience in 2025. The series, set primarily in and around Buenos Aires, struck a nerve far beyond Latin America, with positive reactions pouring in from across the globe.
Among the adaptation’s many fans? Hideo Kojima. The legendary game designer behind Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding praised the series as “a powerhouse work of science fiction from Argentina.” But beyond its wonderful production value, it was the show’s localization quality that helped make it truly resonate. Bringing The Eternaut to a worldwide audience meant preserving its political depth, emotional weight, and cultural texture, without softening its identity. Here’s how a team of conscientious translators, guided by their sense of artistic responsibility and cultural respect, helped pull that off.
Why “Malvinas” Stayed in the Script
One of the most notable and deliberately made localization choices for The Eternaut presented itself early on: The team had to decide whether to call the islands in the South Atlantic off the Argentine coast the “Malvinas” or “Falklands” in the show’s English subtitles. For Argentine translator Daiana Estefanía Díaz, there was never a question as to how the translation would go.
“No Argentine, real or fictional, would call them anything else than Malvinas,” she explained in a recent LinkedIn post. Moreover, Juan Salvo, the protagonist of The Eternaut, is portrayed as a Malvinas war veteran. Translating “Islas Malvinas” to “Falkland Islands,” therefore, would have erased a crucial part of his identity and diluted the political and emotional reality that shaped him.
Because this translation carried so much weight, Díaz didn’t just preserve the name in the English subtitles; she lobbied for its use across every language version of the series. And her campaign worked. Subtitles and dubbing in Czech, Japanese, Italian, Danish, and many other locales all refer to the islands as the Malvinas.
Díaz’s effort was a quiet but powerful act of cultural fidelity on a global stage. “It’s not about personal whims,” Díaz said of her work. “It’s about transmitting the essence and worldview of these characters, and our country, beyond language barriers.”
When Localization Meets Truco
Not every cultural reference in The Eternaut has political associations. One of the first episodes of the series features the card game Truco, a fast-paced, bluff-heavy Argentine classic that’s been passed down for generations.
For local audiences, it’s appearance onscreen was a familiar element of daily life. For international viewers, it was a mystery worth solving.
Soon after the Truco episode aired, Japanese fans, in particular, began posting online, wondering how the game worked. Some confused envido (a type of bet) for a rulebook, while others shared their first matches online, asking for help. Argentine fans responded with tutorials, cheat sheets, and memes. In a world where specific cultural references are often softened or replaced with something more universal, Truco stayed. It was a localization choice at its best: not erasing the unfamiliar, but inviting the world in. The result? A spontaneous, cross-cultural connection that no one could have predicted.
Kojima’s Stamp of Approval
Game designer Hideo Kojima is no stranger to complex, world-building narratives. So when he praised The Eternaut for its mood, themes, and deliberate pacing, it mattered.
Like many viewers, Kojima hadn’t read the original comic, but recognized the Cold War-era DNA and political undertones presented in the series. He even compared The Eternaut to The Body Snatchers, with its themes of invisible enemies and creeping dread. Kojima, along with millions of other viewers, had discovered a uniquely Argentine story, made legible and resonant thanks to a localization team that didn’t flatten its edges.
The Power of Culturalization
The process of bringing The Eternaut into other language iterations involved decoding more than dialogue. For Díaz, the depiction of memory, meaning, and a shared cultural past also came into play, and for her, it was crucial that the show got these elements right.
“Explaining how to play Truco…or why envido points must be revealed before reshuffling the cards was one thing,” she writes. But ensuring a proper portrayal of the details pertaining to the Malvinas, she says, was a task that tapped into something much deeper. “I told them it snowed there in 1982; that the Peruvian military plane isn’t there by accident; that when characters say ‘the islands,’ they mean those two.”
Localization experts like Díaz understand on a visceral level the weight that such details can carry. “[The Malvinas are] a sensitive topic, woven into our political, historical, cultural, and social fabric. It roots us firmly on one side of history, and we’re not moving from it,” she writes.
In that sense, her role is one of a cultural liaison: nothing should get lost in translation, but just as important, the emotional weight of every scene and reference should hit just as hard for viewers in Czechoslovakia or Japan as they do in Buenos Aires.
The Takeaway
We believe in the power of stories told right: not watered down in order to be more “palatable” to a broader audience, but lifted through expert localization, which honors a story’s origin and whom a story is meant for, even as it is shared more broadly.
The global success of The Eternaut proves that when localization is done with care, it is an effective, culturally driven form of storytelling. The use of a single term like Malvinas, or the portrayal of a casual game of Truco, are details that might seem small and perhaps inconsequential on their own. But they’re among hundreds of elements that were shaped by localization. Ultimately, these are the threads that hold the story together and the reason the series feels honest, grounded, and deeply Argentine, even to viewers half a world away.
