Auteurism and game localization — revisiting translational approaches: Film quotations in multimedia interactive entertainment

In the fertile ground between cinema and video games, Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid saga stands out for its auteur’s clear tendency to use film language and aesthetics and for his evident inspiration from pop culture and the American cinematic tradition. Moreover, the series is rich in quotations meant to pay tribute to cinema and communicate with movie-cultured players intertextually. With regard to the process of localization, auteurist references to film culture represent a constraint for translators rendering Kojima’s game into different languages for a Metal Gear Solid-educated audience. This paper presents a comparative analysis of some film quotations in their English into Italian and Spanish localizations of Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid series in order to demonstrate the importance of loyalty to the game experience as a whole within a translational-cultural approach to localization.