7 Conclusion and Way Forward

Video games, described in this monograph as multimedia interactive enter-

tainment software products, have been enjoying increasing prominence
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over the past two decades, so much so that they have become a common
pastime for people of all ages and genders, transcending cultural back-
grounds and geographical borders. According to ISFE’s latest report (2010)
concerning entertainment habits in Europe, one in three Europeans have
confirmed that they spend between five and sixteen hours a week playing
some sort of video game. This is also the case in the US, where a simi-
lar report by ESA (2013) states that video games are played in more than
70 percent of American households and that the average age of players
is thirty-seven. Such high percentages have been made possible because
of the increasing variety of available games, not only in terms of themes
and game mechanics but also in terms of the development of genres for
each demographic and the improvement of ‘serious’ games for education
and professional training purposes, as seen in Chapter 2. It is, therefore,
not surprising that video games now generate more revenue than the cin-
ema box office and the home video and music sales businesses. DFC Intel-
ligence, Reuters and Forbes Magazine agree in the growing value of the
global video game-only market, forecasting $82 billion by 2017. Despite
these staggering figures, which place gaming as a mainstream entertainment
activity popular in an increasing number of countries, video game transla-
tion and localisation, which has been an essential factor in attaining this
global success, has been seldom recognised by the industry or researched
by academics, perhaps due to the low esteem in which the entertainment
industries are regarded in the most traditional academic departments. This
book is intended as a step towards the bridging of that gap, advocating the
premise that the discipline of TS is the right one to offer a solid and rigor-
ous conceptual framework, from a theoretical and professional perspective,
that can equip researchers with the right tools to embark on the study of
this exciting professional specialisation. New knowledge and training are
necessary to tackle MIES creations because they are some of the most theo-
retically and technically complex products translation professionals have to
Copyright 2015. Routledge.

work with.

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 Conclusion and Way Forward 249
The present monograph is also intended to contribute to current trans-
lation training in university programmes and professional translation
courses with a view to facilitate access to previously unavailable knowl-
edge on game translation and localisation processes, as well as to pro-
mote the development of new skills in translation graduates with first-hand
information on challenges, principles, strategies, tools, sources and indus-
try processes.
As new products requiring translation enter the market, the result-
ing expansion in research possibilities would seem to constitute a logical
step forward for academics operating within any paradigm of TS. In this
sense, the TMIES shares some characteristics with the translation of litera-
ture, comics, film, and software applications, as suggested by the creativity
polysystem concept in Chapter 3, but it also shows features and processes
that are unique to video games, such as interactivity, that set it apart from
other professional practices. To promote the suspension of disbelief through
enhanced playability, and the immersion of players in the game world is an
essential designer strategy that requires, among other things, the use of lin-
guistic variables to enable the interactive dialogue and branching storylines
that bring about the feeling of autobiographical involvement for players
(Chapter 4). In addition, another fundamental aspect of video game locali-
sation is the fact that, unlike most other products, all publishers are starting
to plan for the simultaneous worldwide release of all language versions, for
this is the most profitable option. The well-crafted video game artefact and
the mass consumption entertainment product have finally merged into one,
for sim-ship requires the internationalisation of game design and produc-
tion; it means that the localisation process starts as early as parts of the
linguistic content of the game are completed and locked down, but before
the product itself has been finalised. The sim-ship distribution model adds
unprecedented layers of complexity and time pressure to the whole text
translation and product localisation endeavour, not only because cross-time
zone teams need to be synchronised so that pre-announced release dates
are met, but also because of the common lack of finalised information dur-
ing the translation process, and the heterogeneous socio-cultural and legal
issues that need to be taken into account prior to the release of the video
game in each country (Chapter 5).
Although the main countries developing video games are still the US and
Japan, many others have joined this growing industry, including Canada,
the UK, Germany, Russia, Poland and Spain. There is no doubt that the
rapid spread of interactive entertainment around the world has favoured
the young, but expanding, language services sector dedicated to the trans-
lation and linguistic testing of video games, but the opposite is also neces-
sarily true, without specialised SLVs and MLVs the game industry would
not have reached current popularity levels (Chapter 5). Even though Eng-
lish remains in many cases the pivot language through which some lan-
guages are translated, adding yet another layer of theoretical and practical

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 250 Translation and Localisation in Video Games
complexity worthy of research, the variety of both source and target lan-
guages is increasing in terms of new language combinations and direction
of translation. In turn, owing to the pressure of time constraints, translation
companies demand recruits who are proficient in these previously unusual
skills and language pairs, so that the consolidation and provision of such
combinations impose new demands on translation degrees that have to cater
for this very linguistically diverse new market (Chapter 6).
The lack of professionals with the time and aptitude to teach, and the
absence of public information and published research that could help train
existing lecturers, have contributed to the challenge facing current transla-
tion programmes in terms of the knowledge and skills required to fill the pro-
fessional gaps created by the emergence of said new translation needs. Such
research needs to be cross-disciplinary in essence, because of the various
theoretical and practical issues involved, such as the translation of technical
and creative texts, linguistic variables and culturally marked interactivity,
as well as the need to understand the industrial process in which TMIES
is embedded. In this sense, three essential viewpoints have been taken into
consideration in Chapters 5 and 6, namely that of TS as an academic disci-
pline, that of the game localisation vendors as the language professionals,
and that of the global game development and publishing industries as the
original creators and distributors of the product in question. The tensions
among these three stakeholders explain many of the peculiarities that can
be found in the video game translation and localisation processes that have
been discussed throughout this book in terms of the tasks required of lin-
guists and translation professionals. As has been argued in this monograph,
a better knowledge of current practice would help generate the beneficial
research required to inform and improve processes, as well as to produce
better quality products for players across languages and higher revenues
for all companies involved. After years of exposure, players have come to
expect a translation that not only allows them to play but that immerse
them in the game world, in contrast to previous generations which came
to prefer the one in English because the quality of their language version
tended to be rather low.
To add to the complexity of procedures, language professionals catering
for the video game localisation industry are confronted with the transla-
tion of a wide array of linguistic assets, not only in terms of hardware and
software manuals, UI, online help, promotional and legal texts, but also
creative texts, voiceover scripts for dubbing and subtitling, branching story-
lines, and linguistic variables; a minefield for untrained translators. As dis-
cussed in Chapter 5, the concept of ‘deep’ or ‘enhanced’ localisation has
recently emerged with respect to video games. This new concept refers to the
high degree of creativity required from translators, which is one of shared
authorship, resulting in localised versions that can (apparently) depart vastly
from the original in an attempt to enhance playability, engage players and
maintain their immersion in the game experience; an approach practically

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 Conclusion and Way Forward 251
unheard-of in the translation of other texts where (literal) faithfulness to the
ST tends to be considered sacrosanct, often in a rather simplistic manner.
This focus on the creation of a highly customisable interactive entertainment
software product, together with the commercially necessary simultaneous
worldwide release, are two factors contributing to the repositioning of some
game localisation processes from the post-production stage it previously
occupied to the pre-production stage of game development, turning this
particular translation practice into one that can directly influence and, ulti-
mately modify, the final product not only in terms of its language but also of
its actual creative content. This is the core concept behind the internationali-
sation of design, new to the video game and its localisation industry but not
so in older industries with worldwide distribution. A transformation that we
are starting to see in this direction is localisation companies that combine
translation with game development services (Fong 2013) actually creating
new culture-specific content for their locale.
It is also clear that the coming years will bring better, dedicated tools,
middleware and more automation into all processes as a natural stage of
the further industrialisation of language services. One of the key areas that
will develop further is the management of linguistic variables that allow
games to adapt to players’ choices. Localisation and middleware companies
combining programmers and linguists will provide efficient, user-friendly
translation algorithms specific for each language pair streamlining the man-
agement of linguistic variables. Current translation memory technology will
be combined with fully automated machine translation and post-editing
software to reduce the amount of time and money invested in the process.
Linguist play-testing will benefit from better integrated tools to identify, cor-
rect and/or report errors speeding up testing cycles. All this points towards
the further professionalisation of translators, editors and linguistic testers,
which in turn requires training programmes to specialise further.
In my opinion, the translation and localisation of video games show
that a more comprehensive theory of translation is needed from TS if it
is to accommodate and explain current translation practices in the MIES
industry. While linguistic-based theories, process-oriented, descriptive and
functionalist approaches, postcolonial, gender-based and corpus linguistics
perspectives on translation all do contribute to explain some of the chal-
lenges encountered in TMIES, it seems necessary that a harmonisation
of theories is achieved so that current professional practice can be fully
explained and placed within TS. The formulation of such encompassing
theory was outside of the scope of the present monograph but I believe that
the preceding pages mapping out this new professional translation practice
provide enough evidence to substantiate such need and to point towards
indispensable new research avenues.
The interest behind this investigation has been furnished by the author’s
avid curiosity concerning the way in which video games are originally pro-
duced and later translated into other languages, so as to be enjoyed by

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 252 Translation and Localisation in Video Games
different linguistic communities with different cultural backgrounds around
the world. Together with its extensive bibliography, glossary and additional
resources, this study presents itself as solid ground for future, much-needed
research in the area of TMIES. The author is well aware that each chapter
could constitute a topic for an entire new study, as indeed could many of
the sub-sections. The lack of available resources and professional forums
encountered when the present book was only an ambitious idea some years
ago has changed greatly, and this book has benefited immensely from the
opening up of an industry that until very recently operated in silence and,
indeed, almost in secret.
The author has enjoyed being a witness to, and an agent in, these changes,
contributing to them by creating forums for professional gatherings such
as the Game Localization Round Table and the Localization Summit, by
publishing articles in both academic and industry journals with a view to
raising awareness of translation and localisation issues for a wider reader-
ship, and by promoting constructive debate and education activities with
the Localization Special Interest group of the IGDA. These were attempts
to help companies to write and share their guidelines for future video game
localisation projects. It is hoped that these initiatives may help profession-
als in the game industry informing current personnel, guiding recruitment
processes and ensuring that new employees, from linguistic testers to trans-
lators, localisation engineers, team leaders and project managers count with
the right knowledge and skills, so that they do not have to improvise in situ
as their predecessors did.
The higher and further education sectors are slowly incorporating video
games in their translation offer. Mostly throughout Europe but also in the
US, Japan and China, short and long courses are being created which is
helping in the professionalisation of all tasks involved in the translation of
video games.
It is hoped that the present book will trigger the advancement of exciting
and necessary new research within the discipline of TS, helping to explain
the complex translation requirements brought about by the growing variety
of multimedia interactive entertainment software products with which this
new millennium is challenging TS.

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