Congruent with the popularity of video games in the global entertainment landscape, research has demonstrated the importance of video game localization, which involves linguistic, socio-cultural, and technical adaptations of an audiovisual entertainment text for a specific region (Mejías-Climent 2021). Audiovisual games that take place in a virtual environment generally contain a large number of fictional and/or non-fictional elements with cultural specificity. Until recently, however, little scholarly attention had been paid to the phenomenon of translating these (non-)fictional elements in the localization of video games. The book under review, written by Silvia Pettini, fills this gap by unraveling how cultural specificity manifests itself at the interface of the real world and the game world and suggesting which strategies are adopted by game translators in the were linguistic and cultural localization of (non-)fictional elements.

References

Bernal-Merino, Miguel Á.

2015 Translation and Localization in Video Games: Making Entertainment Software Global. Abingdon: Routledge.

Dietz, Frank

2006 “Issues in Localizing Computer Games.” In Perspectives on Localization, edited by Keiran J. Dunne, 121–134. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Loponen, Mika

2009 “Translating Irrealia – Creating a Semiotic Framework for the Translation of Fictional Cultures.” Chinese Semiotic Studies 2 (1): 165–175.

Mejías-Climent, Laura

2021 Enhancing Video Game Localization Through Dubbing. London: Palgrave Macmillan.