How game translations are used to meet market expectations
Aiden Ranford | Victoria University of Wellington, Japanese Programme
Japanese popular culture in the form of anime, manga, and videogames, enjoys significant popularity with diehard international fan groups, who have often become acquainted with aspects of Japanese culture through fan-translated media. However, this base of knowledgeable fans stands unique amongst standard translation practice, which seeks to iron out cultural specificities to create a text that reads flawlessly for a mass audience. This article therefore sets out to explain how videogame translators adopt targeted translation strategies to make their products more marketable to either a mass audience, the members of which may be ignorant, ambivalent, or even hostile to Japanese pop culture products, or to dedicated niche fan groups whose interest in Japan has been stoked by unofficial translations that frequently position themselves as the only avenue for accessing an “authentic” text. The final releases for eight pairs of Japanese games from the Role-Playing Game genre will be analysed to illustrate how far-reaching translation decisions have been used to make individual games more marketable to either group.
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Gameography
Game title
publisher, year of first release)
Atelier Rorona Plus: The Alchemist of Arland
(Koei Tecmo 2013)
Bravely Default
(Square-Enix 2013)
Destiny
(Activision 2014)
Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten
(Nippon Ichi Software 2011)
Final Fantasy VII
(Square 1997)
Final Fantasy X HD
(Square-Enix 2013)
Grand Theft Auto V
(Rockstar Games 2013)
Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth
(Compile Heart 2013)
Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII
(Square-Enix 2013)
Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch
(Bandai Namco 2011)
Persona 4: Golden
(Atlus 2012)
Pokemon X
(The Pokemon Company 2013)
Soulcalibur
series(Bandai Namco 1996 –)
Star Wars: The Old Republic
(Electronic Arts 2011)
Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
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Mangiron, Carme
2021. Found in Translation: Evolving Approaches for the Localization of Japanese Video Games. Arts 10:1 ► pp. 9 ff.
O’Hagan, Minako, Julie McDonough Dolmaya & Hendrik J. Kockaert
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 1 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.