Video Game Localisation for Fans by Fans

Sánchez, Pablo Muñoz

doi:10.1075/jial.1.07mun

Cited by 43 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 1 publication

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…the lengths the localization team goes through to make gripping, enjoyable dialog, translated from the original Japanese into English, while still maintaining 6 Due to the scope of the paper, it cannot engage with the issue of fan translation, also known as "rom-hacking" in the video game industry. For more information about fan translation of games and participatory culture, see Muñoz-Sánchez (2009); O'Hagan (2007,2017) and O'Hagan and Mangiron (2013). 7 In the game, personas are the manifestation of the personality of the person who summons them to battle when they face some hardship.…”

Section: The Localization Of Persona: Rethinking Localization Strategies To Meet Fans' Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Found in Translation: Evolving Approaches for the Localization of Japanese Video Games

Mangirón

2021

Arts

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Japanese video games have entertained players around the world and played an important role in the video game industry since its origins. In order to export Japanese games overseas, they need to be localized, i.e., they need to be technically, linguistically, and culturally adapted for the territories where they will be sold. This article hopes to shed light onto the current localization practices for Japanese games, their reception in North America, and how users’ feedback can contribute to fine-tuning localization strategies. After briefly defining what game localization entails, an overview of the localization practices followed by Japanese developers and publishers is provided. Next, the paper presents three brief case studies of the strategies applied to the localization into English of three renowned Japanese video game sagas set in Japan: Persona (1996–present), Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (2005–present), and Yakuza (2005–present). The objective of the paper is to analyze how localization practices for these series have evolved over time by looking at industry perspectives on localization, as well as the target market expectations, in order to examine how the dialogue between industry and consumers occurs. Special attention is given to how players’ feedback impacted on localization practices. A descriptive, participant-oriented, and documentary approach was used to collect information from specialized websites, blogs, and forums regarding localization strategies and the reception of the localized English versions. The analysis indicates that localization strategies for Japanese games have evolved over time from a higher to a lower degree of cultural adaptation in order to meet target markets’ expectations. However, it was also noted that despite the increasing tendency to preserve the sociocultural content of the original, the language used in the translations needs to be vivid and idiomatic in order to reach a wider audience and provide an enjoyable gameplay experience.

show abstract

Section: The Localization Of Persona: Rethinking Localization Strategies To Meet Fans' Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Found in Translation: Evolving Approaches for the Localization of Japanese Video Games

Mangirón

2021

Arts

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Even though there are several publications on the crowdsourcing of localization (Cronin, 2010;Muñoz Sánchez, 2009;O'Hagan, 2009), the outsourcing of translation quality to a community of users entails a brand new approach, and one that has not been discussed thus far in TS.…”

Section: A Critical Review Of the Facebook Model In The Light Of Translation Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

From many one: Novel approaches to translation quality in a social network era

Jiménez-Crespo

2021

LANS-TTS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

For decades, the fuzzy notion of translation quality has evolved parallel to the theorizations of translation and localization. This paper focuses on a novel approach to quality evaluation in the localization industry: how Facebook crowdsourced quality evaluation to an active community of users that votes on proposed translations. This approach, unthinkable a decade ago, seems to combine and distill some of the best aspects of several previous Translation Studies evaluation proposals, such as user-based approaches (Nida, 1964), functionalist approaches (Nord, 1997; Reiss and Vermeer, 1984) or corpus-assisted approaches (Bowker, 2001). These models were largely criticized at the time because they did not explicitly indicate how they could be professionally implemented. The current paper critically reviews the emerging crowdsourcing model in light of these approaches to quality evaluation and describes how mechanisms suggested in these earlier theoretical proposals are actually implemented in the Facebook model.

show abstract

“…Luis Pérez-González Fan audiovisual translation (Dwyer 2018) encompasses three modes of mediation. Romhacking involves accessing a video game's ROM (read-only memory) data to localize its spoken and written language components (Muñoz Sánchez 2009). In some cases, translation hacking may be part of a wider process of modding, whereby fans tamper with the graphics and even the sequencing of game tasks or levels (O'Hagan 2009;O'Hagan and Mangiron 2013).…”

Section: Fan Audiovisual Translationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fan audiovisual translation

Pérez-González¹

2019

Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Video Game Localisation for Fans by Fans

Cited by 43 publications

References 1 publication

Found in Translation: Evolving Approaches for the Localization of Japanese Video Games

Found in Translation: Evolving Approaches for the Localization of Japanese Video Games

From many one: Novel approaches to translation quality in a social network era

Fan audiovisual translation

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About