1. Prolegomena to Translation and Localization in Video Games

MICHAŁ LISECKI Akademia Techniczno-Humanistyczna w Bielsku-Białej From T9N to L10N (or I18N, or C13N) 1. Prolegomena to translation and localization in video games Key words: video games, translation, localization, transcreation, multimodality, multidimen- sionality, proper names, onomastics, audio-visual translation Słowa klucze: gry komputerowe, tłumaczenie, lokalizacja, transkreacja, multimodalność, wielowymiarowość, nazwy własne, onomastyka, tłumaczenie audiowizualne Introduction In the contemporary world, communicative practices are predominantly mediated by a wide range of digital technologies supporting speech, image, video, and textual communication equally. Digital environments, and in this paper specifically video games, do not only serve a purpose of new kind of interaction domains, but are, in fact, a new paradigm mediat- ing and augmenting their users’ social activities. (Lisecki, 2014:21-22) The current global status of the gaming market available to international communities of gamers from around the world equally has largely been possible because of all the translation (T9N) and localization (L10N) efforts, sometimes recently also preceded by more careful internationalization (I18N) practices, allowing for users across different cultural or language backgrounds interact and communicate with in those environments. Video games, although at first ignored and denigrated by scholars of various disciplines, who saw them rather as trivial and a medium for children (Newman, 2004:5), only recently 1 Across various texts on translation and localization those acronyms are widely used and therefore also briefly introduced here at the beginning in this paper. However, as a piece of scholarly writing, we shall refrain from using the abbreviated forms further in this paper. Their application in the texts results simply from a need to economize on the time taken to type these across various texts and includes the initial and final letters with a digit which stands for the number of the replaced letters. Thus, localization becomes L10N, translation T9N, internationalization I18N, and culturalization C13N. V8N for validation and G11N for globalization can also be found. 162 Michał Lisecki started gaining recognition and wider attention. Consequently, so far underexposed in translation studies (TS) as well, only recently translation and localization in the context of video games has slowly started to earn interest, as both the industry as well as the scholarly world started to realize that it can bring benefit not just to the games industry but can also contribute some interesting insight into TS research within the multidimensional and multimodal audio- visual translation (AVT) environments. (O’Hagan, 2013) Present paper is therefore undeniably only prolegomena to a multitude of approaches present not only in computer studies but notably in TS with special emphasis on translation in video games involving rich narrative and lending themselves to a wide variety of translation technologies, these days being largely a subject to localization (Costales, 2014: 226). To this regard, it outlines a selection of issues that seem to be featured prominently across TS within video games, especially the aspects that translation faces in a complex combination with tasks involving game localization, and set against a background of somewhat better-established areas of AVT studies. Rather than deliver a straightforward answer to any questions raised across various studies, this paper seeks to present a concise and yet possibly most comprehen- sive overview of the multitude of ways of approaching at researching translation in games, quite often resulting immediately from the very limitations of the medium and the specificity of the ephemeral nature of the gaming market. The background: terminology and typology The market of video games has seen a constant growth of interest, propelled by an unpa- ralleled technological development in recent 10 years. At present, the game industry has broadened its gamer’s profile as more and more players engage in social gaming interaction and in casual gaming, not just on their computers or consoles, but also through various mobile devices2 with multimodal gaming environments becoming more and more complex. The stunning 11-digit figures in USD for the value of the gaming market in the leading countries across the world (Polish Gamers report, 2017: 7-11) has also contributed to the fact that researchers started to recognize the fact that digital entertainment has become a widespread phenomenon and video games these days serve a tempting corpus of analysis for scholars across various disciplines. 2 According to a recent report for IDATE the market of eSports (the practice of playing video games competi- tively) attracts an audience of nearly 350 million people worldwide, mainly on the Web and the market of the so- called “serious gaming” (applied games designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment) is worth 10 billion EUR. From T9N to L10N… 163 The gaming industry has not only been researched for its technological potential, but it has also served various types of social (Corliss, 2011), ludology studies (Newman, 2004; Mal- liet, 2007; Frasca, 2011), as well as psychological studies seeking explanation on the relation- ship between their highly addictive character and their structure (King et al., 2010). Additio- nally, it is because of the need to “deal with compelling storylines, complex characters and multimodal environments that need to be successfully adapted in order to maintain the game experience […]” (Costales, 2014: 226) that translation efforts grew into bigger challenge evolving into complex localization tasks. At first, however, the status of translation in video games remained underexplored, with noticeable inconsistency in terminology in research, where the same research domain received different names of “electronic games”, “computer games”, “digital games”, or variations in their spelling with “videogames” and “video games” (as noted by O’Hagan, 2013). Even though research in this field is a relatively recent phenomenon in Poland, yet similar inconsistency in reference terminology persists as well: “gry wideo” (Szeja, 2012; Polish Gamers Report – Raport Branży Gier Wideo, 2015 and later eds.), “gry komputerowe” (Domaciuk- Czarny, 2016), with some authors recognizing the unique character of their objects of research and foregnizing the names by retaining the original forms: “gry RPG” (Lisecki, 2016) or fully domesticating them: “Tekstowe Gry Fabularne (TG)” (Herbut, 2017:73 ff.).3 This inconsistency may result from the very technical specificity of the multimodal medium of games and, in fact, it seems that authors wished to convey this specificity of particu- lar forms and devices they considered in their studies: computer-based form of entertainment software used on various electronic platforms, game console-based systems4, as well as mobile formats (phones and tablets) including such unusual applications as video-less games 3 A similar keyword terminology search across Google Scholar (as of December 2019) showed the following tendencies: a search for “video games” returned a stunning 1M hits, and a runner up “computer games” scoring roughly over 0.5M hits, with all the others being marginal, namely “digital games” (79000), “electronic games” (38700). Bearing in mind that Google Scholar is still not very popular among researchers in Poland publishing their articles in Polish, a comparable search for Polish counterparts of the above mentioned keyword terminology does not seem to be representative, yet again it is as follows: “gry komputerowe” (3830) and “gry wideo” (998), which is not a well-established and quite a misleading translation in Polish as it uses the latin based root (video) which in Polish implies the use of outdated VCR technology and thus results in the use of this concept as a whole to be deprecated across research papers as well. 4 These days, these are not single-user systems anymore but allow for seamless and highly immersive online participation involving sound, text, as well as visual communication, thus blurring the distinction between computer and console games (O’Hagan, 2013). This, in turn, together with high popularity of console gaming, has allowed for the limited translation attempts to evolve into more complex localization practices, referred to later more extensively further in this paper. 164 Michał Lisecki providing immersive gaming experience to visually impaired players by conveying the audio layer only to reinforce the feeling of fear or suspense (Mangiron & Zhang, 2016). Principally, we can assume that since the first video games were made the core idea was always the same – to entertain. Nevertheless, people entertain themselves in games in various ways and these, consequently, result from the types of games they engage in. Some researchers apply a rough classification of game genres covering sports, arcade, action or simulation, occasionally going into details with some more specific sub-types like first person shooters, role playing games (RPG), hack and slash, multi-user dungeons (MUDs), narrative or later graphic adventures (Newman, 2004; O’Hagan, 2013). Unlike in some simple games in the early days of the industry, where gaming rules, the plot and action were very simple because they were greatly limited by the capacity of the sys- tem, video games these days present users with multitude of options they can get engaged

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