Video games are part of the growing digital entertainment industry for which game localization has become pivotal in serving international markets. As well as addressing the practical needs of the industry to facilitate translator and localizer training, this book seeks to conceptualize game localization in an attempt to locate it in Translation Studies in the context of the technologization of contemporary translation practices. Designed to provide a comprehensive introduction to the topic of game localization the book draws on the literature in Game Studies as well as Translation Studies. The book’s readership is intended to be translation scholars, game localization practitioners and those in Game Studies developing research interest in the international dimensions of the digital entertainment industry. The book aims to provide a road map for the dynamic professional practices of game localization and to help readers visualize the expanding role of translation in one of the 21st century's key global industries.

Authored by two internationally known experts in game localization, this text is a comprehensive, up-to-date reference for information about how to localize software for games, whether they are developed for the PC, console, or other platforms.

This book is a multidisciplinary study of the translation and localisation of video games. It offers a descriptive analysis of the industry – understood as a global phenomenon in entertainment – and aims to explain the norms governing present industry practices, as well as game localisation processes. Additionally, it discusses particular translation issues that are unique to the multichannel nature of video games, in which verbal and nonverbal signs must be cohesively combined with interactivity to achieve maximum playability and immerse players in the game’s virtual world. Although positioned within the theoretical framework of descriptive translation studies, Bernal-Merino incorporates research from audiovisual translation, software localisation, computer assisted translation, comparative literature, and video game production. Moving beyond this framework, Translation and Localisation in Video Games challenges some of the basic tenets of translation studies and proposes changes to established and unsatisfactory processes in the video game and language services industries.

An in-depth exploration of the localization of Nintendo's blockbuster franchise from Japanese to English.

The different contributions in this pioneering volume address the emerging fields of Game Accessibility and Game Localization from different angles, providing insightful information about these relatively unexplored academic areas with such close tights to the industry.

Web localization is a cognitive, textual, communicative and technological process by which interactive web texts are modified to be used by audiences in different sociolinguistic contexts. Translation and Web Localization provides an in-depth and comprehensive overview into this emerging field of study. The book covers the key areas and main theoretical and practical approaches of the subject, rather than a step by step practical guide. Topics covered include the often controversial definition of localization, how the process develops, what constitutes a text in this process, digital genre theory and its implications, and how to conduct research or training in this field. The book concludes with a look into the dynamic nature of web localization and the forces, such as crowdsourcing, that are reshaping web localization and translation as we know it. In light of the deep changes brought by the Internet, Translation and Web Localization is an indispensable book for researchers, postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students of translation studies, as well as practitioners and researchers in related fields such as computational linguistics, applied linguistics, Internet linguistics, digital genre theory and web development.

Translation technology has evolved quickly with a large number of translation tools available. In this revised addition, much content has been added about translating and engineering HTML and XML documents, multilingual web sites, and HTML-based online help systems. Other major changes include the addition of chapters on internationalizatoi, software quailty assurance, descktop publishing and localization supprort. There is a focus on translators who want to learn about localization ad translation technology.

This book explores the impact of a video game’s degree of realism or fictionality on its linguistic dimensions, investigating the challenges and strategies for translating realia and irrealia, the interface of the real world and the game world where culture-specificity manifests itself. The volume outlines the key elements in the translation of video games, such as textual non-linearity, multitextuality, and playability, and introduces the theoretical framework used to determine a game’s respective degree of realism or fictionality. Pettini applies an interdisciplinary approach drawing on video game research and Descriptive Translation Studies to the linguistic and translational analysis of in-game dialogs in English-Italian and English-Spanish language pairs from a corpus of three war video games. This approach allows for an in-depth look at the localization challenges posed by the varying degree of realism and fictionality across video games and the different strategies translators employ in response to these challenges. A final chapter offers a comparative analysis of the three games and subsequently avenues for further research on the role of culture-specificity in game localization. This book is key reading for students and scholars interested in game localization, audiovisual translation studies, and video game research.

This book provides a theoretical and practical framework for researchers and practitioners who focus on the construction, interpretation and retextualisation of audiovisual texts. It defines translation as a communicative and interpretative process, with translators seen as cross-cultural mediators who make the denotative-semantic and connotative-pragmatic dimensions of source scripts accessible to target receivers, prompting equivalent perlocutionary effects, while still respecting the original illocutionary force. While existing research on audiovisual translation generally adopts a product-based perspective, examining the lexico-semantic and syntactic features of source and target versions, this book proposes an “Interactive Model”, in order to explore what happens in the translators’ minds, as well as the influence of the interaction between the linguistic and extralinguistic dimensions in the construction and interpretation of audiovisual texts. The application of this Model to the analysis of a corpus of humorous films, TV series and video games foregrounds the integration between the analysis of the source-text features and the knowledge of the target linguacultural backgrounds in the creation of pragmalingustic equivalent scripts. At the same time, this book also provides valuable insights into the audience’s reception of these translations, by submitting close-ended and open-ended questionnaires to subjects representing empirical receivers, thus helping to evaluate the degree of linguistic and functional equivalence of target versions.