Translation Spaces - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2025

Game localization is the complex industrial process of adapting digital games linguistically, culturally and technically, seeking to deliver a gameplay experience as close as possible to that of the original. Guided by Livingston’s (2018) Review Analysis methodology combined with thematic analysis, we tap into user reviews of the Taiwanese game Detention (Red Candle Games 2017) in Simplified Chinese, English and Japanese, to gauge and compare player experiences in relation to localization, and explore the scope of review data for player-focused game localization research. Our qualitative analysis implicates culturalization as an impactful underlying factor in shaping the gameplay experience, for which translation issues remain opaque. As long as certain limitations are acknowledged, real-world data such as Steam user reviews provide an alternative source that is high in ecological validity, offering promising scope for future player-focused game localization research towards enriching the international dimension of Games User Research.

This study sets out to investigate whether and to what extent the narratives contained in film titles and their translations can differ from each other. Ten dramas selected from the work of two internationally renowned film directors, Zhang Yimou and Jia Zhangke, were analysed using narrative theory. The findings suggest that films targeted at the international market tend to employ selective appropriation, causal emplotment and relationality, and demonstrate variations in title translation. Apart from linguistic and commercial factors, narratives can vary in Chinese film titles and their translations according to cultural and social considerations, including political censorship.

The localization industry has developed at the levels of content, technology and workflow. While agility can describe any virtual job nowadays, its application in localization should be highlighted, since agile working is now widely adopted in developer teams. Job satisfaction has been researched within translation studies, sociology of work and organizational research. This article addresses the impact of agile working in localization, as a virtual and IT-related domain, on the job satisfaction of localization language agents. It is based on a survey and tackles agile working aspects that are relevant to the translation workflow in localization. It also borrows key job satisfaction elements from other domains, which can reveal understudied areas in our domain. The results show, for example, a positive relationship between job satisfaction and in-process and in-team recognition, as well as autonomy. Job satisfaction is lower when there is a lack of context or small-size projects.

This study adopts Q methodology to explore the ethical perspectives of translation students and professional translators on translation technology. It reveals four salient viewpoints among the two groups, i.e., “Boldness with Tradition,” “Relativism in Intersection,” “Empowerment without Agency,” and “Optimism and Social Darwinism,” and finds that the two groups differ in perspectives on clients’ interest, human translation’s sustainability, the humanist values of translation, and communication of technological usage. A shared acceptance of technology driven by social responsibility is also identified across the two groups. The findings suggest that despite the ethical divide between the two groups, lack of ethical knowledge may also exist on the professional side. Considering gap but also bridge, it is argued that the revealed consensus between the two groups offers a foundation for dialogue, where translation education and industry can converge to build a more inclusive ethical vision that encompasses a wider range of stakeholders.

Domain gain in Irish-language terminology has received significant attention over the past two decades. At national-government level in Ireland, significant measures have been taken to ensure that specialist domains are catered for in Irish so that translators, legislators, journalists and anyone working in the Irish-language sector have the resources at hand when specific terminology is required. One area that has witnessed a more grassroots-up approach, however, is the LGBTQ+ domain. This article seeks to determine the current status of LGBTQ+ terminological provision in Irish and to compare relevant initiatives with terminology work carried out in the same domain in two other Celtic languages: Welsh and Scottish Gaelic. The article addresses the need for adequate terminology provision in the area as well as the practical challenges that such initiatives face.

Recent efforts in debiasing Machine Translation (MT) concentrate on gender-inclusive or neutral language for the translation of sentences containing ambiguous gender entities. Such studies, however, ignore cases that require a specific gender beyond masculine and feminine, i.e. non-binary. By comparing translation with post-editing, the present contribution investigates whether MT can be a useful tool to produce gender-fair translations despite its biased outputs. Twelve language professionals had to either translate or post-edit three English-language texts mentioning non-binary actors into German. For each text, they had to use a different gender-fair language (GFL) approach, i.e. gender-neutral rewording, gender-inclusive characters, and neosystems. Results from screen recordings, retrospective interviews, and target text analysis show that, while post-editing is usually faster than translation, the perceived cognitive effort is generally high with no significant differences emerging in the translation process and, partially, the number of mistakes in the use of GFL.

Video gaming has gained immense popularity as a form of entertainment all around the world. However, most games are not fully accessible for players with visual disabilities. Audio description (AD) translates visual elements into spoken words, thus making games accessible to players with vision loss. The TransAD4games project aims to explore the creation and translation of audio descriptions for video games to improve game accessibility across languages and cultures. This article presents part of the research findings from the TransAD4games, reporting the outcomes of a reception study on players’ preferences and opinion about AD for the game Before I Forget (3-Fold Games, 2020) translated from English into Spanish and AD created from scratch in Spanish. Results show that while players preferred the original Spanish AD created from scratch, they also appreciated the translated version, suggesting that translating AD is a viable and acceptable option to improve visual game accessibility.