The localization of video games: a study on the practical applications and their linguistic challenges

Abstract

The digital entertainment industry has been thriving in the last fifty years, with video games rapidly becoming its flagship and best known products. The global market expansion and video games consequent worldwide consumption has generated the need for them to be translated in multiple languages and in a timely fashion for several target markets. While the industry has come up with factually-driven ‘best practices’ and a general tendency towards standardizing procedures subsumed in the term localization (whose controversial and complex nature will be defined in Chapter 1), Translation Studies have paid little attention to this phenomenon, applying categories and theoretical approaches borrowed from other academic domains, which have proved unfitting to this new sector. Drawing on recent groundbreaking conceptualizations advocated in the Game Localization field, this work seeks to combine the view of translation scholars with localization practitioners’ vantages, thanks to the author’s experience both in academia and in the specific industry. The localization paradigm will be investigated in relation to the main translation principles, in an attempt to explore this ostensible dichotomy. Hence, the history and the evolution of the localization of video games will be analysed, followed by an overview of the structure of the game localization industry. Finally, some practical examples of linguistic and cultural challenges related to the topic will be provided, along with a number of reflections on the future of the field. As it will be shown, the main argument of the paper is that Translation Studies have to take into account the fact that video games are not solely the latest product in the digital entertainment, but also a new media, prompting different mechanisms and dynamics in the process of adapting them in the Target Text so far unseen elsewhere, e.g. in movies, in books and even in productivity softwares. In turn, the industry should acknowledge the importance of some tenets belonging to the domain of Translation Studies which have passed unnoticed or deliberately underestimated, and start to include them in their rationales.