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Video Game Translation in the Czech Republic - - from Fan Era to Professionalism

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Video Game Translation in the Czech Republic - - from Fan Era to Professionalism Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English-language Translation Jiří Petrů Video Game Translation in the !ech "epublic - $ from fan era to professionalism Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek %&'' I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………….. Jiří Petrů Ackno(ledgement I would like to thank Milan Czarnowski, Aleš Kopřiva, Jiří Matyskiewicz, Pavel Mondschein, Václav Poláček, Karel Pospíšil, Adam Rambousek, Marek Tvrdý and Radek Zelycz for their free time and the willingness to be interviewed, without which this thesis would be inconceivable; and Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek for his kind supervising and providing valuable insights from the point of view of an industry outsider. Table of ontents Table of Contents.............................................................................................................4 1. Foreword.....................................................................................................................6 1.1 Thesis Structure.......................................................................................................8 1.2 Methodology...........................................................................................................9 2. Introduction to Translation of Video Games...........................................................13 2.1 The Place of Translation in the Video Game Industry..........................................17 2.2 Source Languages.................................................................................................19 2.3 A Note on Terminology ........................................................................................22 Why video games?.................................................................................................22 Why translation?....................................................................................................23 3. The Development of Video Game Translation in the Czech Republic.................25 3.1 From the Fan Scene to Professionalism................................................................26 1990s – The Birth of a Community........................................................................26 Around 2000 – The Gold Rush of Fan Translation................................................30 Early 2000s – Gradual Professionalisation............................................................34 Late 2000s – The Decline of Fan Translation........................................................38 3.1 Comparison to Other Countries............................................................................40 4. The Process of Game Translation.............................................................................43 4.1 The Process of Professional Translation...............................................................44 4.2 The Process of Fan Translation ............................................................................53 4.3 General Challenges for Video Game Translators..................................................60 4.4 Translating PC games vs. Console Games............................................................63 4.5 Dubbing and Subtitles...........................................................................................65 - 4 - 4.6 When Things Get Done by People Outside the Industry......................................66 5. Special Topics in Game Translation.........................................................................69 5.1 Game Translation, Legality, Piracy.......................................................................69 ‘Stolen’ translations................................................................................................71 5.2 Quality of the Translation.....................................................................................73 Terminology...........................................................................................................73 Domestication and Fidelity to the Original............................................................76 Style and Creative Translation...............................................................................78 Quality....................................................................................................................82 5.3 User Feedback, Translators’ Motivations..............................................................84 6. Conclusion..................................................................................................................86 Sources............................................................................................................................89 Written Sources and Interviews.............................................................................89 Video Games Mentioned in the Text......................................................................95 Summary........................................................................................................................98 Resumé............................................................................................................................99 - 5 - '. Foreword From the pastime of bespectacled nerds, video games have over the last four decades developed into a mass entertainment enjoyed by people of both genders and all ages. An oft-quoted piece of data poses the video game industry against the film industry which is traditionally seen as the largest segment of the entertainment industry – however with $33 billion in game sales world-wide in 2010 (Mazel 2011a), the game industry actually surpasses the film industry’s $31.81 billion (Frankel 2011). But while film studies have long been a part of curricula, academia still have to catch up with video games. Game studies are a fledgling field of scientific interest, still struggling through their infant phases, but slowly establishing themselves on universities around the world. Video games, of course, are an interesting object of study not only for media scientists or sociologist, but even for the student of translation – we are, after all, talking about a huge world-wide industry that localises its products to many world languages. Still, translation studies have been slow to notice this new phenomenon. The first studies on this topic have been published merely some ~5 years ago, and remain a field of interest only for a limited circle of academicians. We are still in the very beginnings and a lot remains to be learned about translations of video games. At first glance, game translation might simply seem as a subset of software localisation, which already is well known and well described in the field of translations studies. But this perception could not be farther from truth – while video games are indeed software, in the sense that they do require a computer or a console or a smart-phone to run, this is where the similarity ends. There are many differences that will be described in detail later, but for now let it simply be said that comparing translations of games to translations of general software is like comparing translations of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels to translations of wash-machine manuals. 1 These numbers are to be taken with a grain of salt, but I did my best to provide comparable data – the game industry revenues include sales of brand new copies only, not counting e.g. used games or gaming hardware such as game consoles. The data on the film industry similarly include box office revenues (i.e. cinema tickets) only, ignoring DVD sales or home electronics such as DVD players. Both ignore minor local companies not producing for the established global networks. - 6 - “Another difference between game and software localisation lies in the fact that whilst functionality has been the key priority in the software localisation paradigm, in a game this functionality must be achieved with a high degree of creativity and originality. (...) This is because the main purpose of a game is to entertain the user, whereas the utilitarian dimension is the goal of business software.” (Mangiron and O’Hagan 2006) This misperception is perhaps the reason why academicians dealing with game translation have for the most part focused on the texts themselves, advocating their unique stance as a separate type of translation. A large part of the available texts on game translation describes the specific challenges and other characteristics that differentiate video games from other forms of translation (see for example Bernal Merino 2007). The other main line of discourse examines the need for and the use of creativity in video-game translation, and concepts like cultural domestication or style (see for example Mangiron and O’Hagan 2006 or Di Marco 2007). The scope of this thesis will however be slightly different – I would like to ‘zoom out’ of the texts themselves and focus on the industry as a whole, the people and the communities involved in video-game translation. To make this task a little less daunting, I will limit myself on the specific case of the Czech Republic. There is a reason for the choice of the Czech Republic aside of the fact that it is my native environment. Czech Republic, as a marginal market of little import for foreign distributors, has had a very lively ‘fan scene’ of amateurs organising themselves over the Internet and translating games for ‘free’ where the official publishing chains did not provide
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