The translation of realia and irrealia in game localization: culture-specificity between realism and fictionality

Abstract

Nowadays video games are a global phenomenon, gaming is a widespread pastime in society and the digital interactive entertainment industry forms one of the major and most profitable creative sectors in the world. Interestingly, translation is pivotal because it allows products to cross cultural and linguistic borders in order to reach players in different locales. Given the wide variety of games in terms of genre, volume of text and playtime, a systematic approach is not workable in order to explore their complex nature. From a Translation Studies (TS) perspective, this is even more complex because games are multi-textual and may require very different skills ranging from literary to technical translation. This research aims at investigating the influence the degree of realism or fictionality of game contents exerts on language transfer strategies while focusing on the diversity of specializations required by this new medium. Special attention will be paid to the translation of realia and irrealia, since they represent the main points of contact between the real world and the game world, and seem to pose very different translation challenges. The main objective is to study this realm in order to provide a theoretical framework of basic tools for translators in game localization with a particular emphasis on the English-Italian/Spanish pairs. An interdisciplinary approach will be used to understand the multifaceted nature of games as technological artefacts and cultural media whereas a TS descriptive approach will be adopted to study the in-game dialogues of the titles included in the corpus, and the translational challenges they present.