Digital Translation - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2023

Abstract

Machine translation (MT) tools are widely available. They may be present in different spaces in ways that consumers of the content do not necessarily control or realise, and research to date has paid little attention to these human-MT encounters. This article draws on the philosophy of technology literature to consider implications of MT’s permeating presence in online environments as well as in face-to-face interactions. The focus of the article is on two situations where humans can come across MT: while browsing websites and when speaking with figures of authority. The article highlights ways in which humans’ relationship with MT transcends conscious decisions to operate an MT tool directly. It argues that the human-MT relationship can also be one of immersion where MT blends with the environment in ways that, on the one hand, break language barriers but, on the other, influence, persuade, and on occasion misinform.

Abstract

This study examines the localization of food- and drink-related items in The Witcher 3 (2015). It analyzes the original English and Arabic versions using the corpus approach. A list of food- and drink-related lexemes was extracted from the English original game and these lexemes were traced to their context in the English and Arabic versions using the concordance function in Sketch Engine. The concordance analysis focused on the translation strategies adopted to localize food- and drink-related lexemes into Arabic and on the success of the translation in the socio-cultural and religious contexts of the target culture. The data reveals that foreign food-related terms are mostly domesticated, whereas drink-related terms are foreignized. The findings of this study suggest that foreignization strategies can be used for localization purposes to create a target video game that minimizes the cultural gaps between the source and target cultures and provides a less disruptive gaming experience.

Abstract

Our study was motivated to investigate reasons why the Spanish localisation of the video game Iron Man 2 (Sega 2010) attracted extensive criticism. Scholars and gamers alike labelled it “abysmal” (Mejías-Climent 2021b, 134) and among the worst dubbing in Spanish of all time in the video game history. This article provides a descriptive and empirical analysis of the Spanish dubbing of the cinematic scenes of the game. We have focused our analysis, firstly, on the synchrony of the 50 cinematic scenes following Mejías-Climent’s (2021b) levels of restriction and types of dubbing synchronies, and, secondly, on the voice actors’ performance (acting, pronunciation and diction) and voice quality (character coherence) for the most relevant game characters by applying the methodology for voice quality analysis, drawing on Bosseaux (2015, 2018) and Rodríguez Fernández-Peña (2020). The results show that there has been a chain of oversights in the dubbing process, involving dubbing directors, voice actors and testers, which likely contributed to the negative reviews of the localised version in Spanish.

Abstract

In this paper we describe the localization of a phone app that was completed by students enrolled in a university translation program. The app in question serves the university campus community. The experience related herein follows the earlier localization of a COVID-related app, described in Warburton and Krishnan (2021). The current project was larger in scope, covered more subject areas, included additional languages, leveraged different technologies (as a result of lessons learned), and repurposed more linguistic resources. We also reflect on phone apps as a genre and the impacts of their increasing role in society for the localization industry. We demonstrate that the Functionalist approach to translation is appropriate for app localization. However, challenges, both technical and linguistic, point to the need for better internationalization practices and localization tools. The localization of phone apps would benefit from further research of this genre in translation theory.

This article reviews Enhancing Video Game Localization Through Dubbing