The Journal of Internationalization and Localization - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2022

In late 2020, the free online translation tool Microsoft Translator began to offer the option of translating into “French (Canada)” as a target language, alongside the previously offered “French”. Using a list of ten COVID-19 terms previously identified by Bowker (2020) as having different equivalents in Canadian French and European French, we evaluate the ability of Microsoft Translator to localize these terms into the two varieties of French. The findings indicate that while this tool does a good job of localizing the terms into Canadian French, it also uses a high number of Canadian French terms when the target language is set to “French”. One potential reason for this may be that the corpus used to train the tool for “French” contains a disproportionate number of examples from Canadian sources, and so there may be a problem of bias where the tool is amplifying Canadian French in the machine translation output.

Although video game localization has lately attracted the attention of researchers, with many papers and books being devoted to this practice, it is still an underdeveloped area of Translation Studies research in Iran. The present study provides a literature review of research carried out in Iran on video game localization since 2009 to address this gap. The reviews revealed that studies on Iranian game localization fall into translational, social, cultural and political, and historical categories. The review also showed that the translational aspect is the most explored area followed by social, cultural and political, and historical aspects. The historical aspect has received the least attention in the literature, specifically in academic publications. This paper offers potential areas for future research on game localization in Iran in each aspect.

In the field of translation studies, game localisation is considered a growing branch of audiovisual translation in which localisers translate and adapt game content for successful circulation across foreign markets. This paper sheds light on the process of localising religious content and obscene references in the game Fiesta Online by comparing it to the Arabic-localised version Arafiesta on the basis of a corpus of 740 dialogue strings. Drawing on the frameworks developed by Delabastita (1989), Zitawi (2008) and Al-Adwan (2015), the analysis scrutinises game elements that are considered controversial in the Arab world. These items were omitted, mitigated, or adapted to isolate the theme of Paganism from the original content. Visual features were retained except for a few instances. Finally, during the process of localising interactive aspects of the game, retention, deletion and adaptation were frequently used. The paper highlights how blending game localisation, a prominent localisation approach changing the intersemiotic channels (the verbal, pictorial and interactive layers) of video games, plays a pivotal role in promoting and marketing game imports in the Arab world, which is now one of the largest growing markets.