Digital Translation - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2024

Cultural ergonomics aims to integrate the dimension of culture into systems and products to make them safer, more useful, and more accessible to a wider range of multicultural users. This makes it an effective conceptual tool to create a localized product that is more inclusive. By using the example of security questions in drop-down menus replicated across North American English websites, this paper argues that overlooking ‘culture’ as a site of diverse experiences leads to a harder-to-navigate product for the multicultural user. By juxtaposing the reality of a multicultural context with the monoethnic, middle-class, and heteronormative cultural dimensions of security questions, the cloning of questions across websites can be seen as satisfying the needs of the dominant power rather than the subordinated peoples – both immigrant and non-heteronormative. Operationalizing cultural ergonomics in the translation workflow provides a means to recognize and address this power imbalance.

Authenticity is commonly discussed by scholars specialized in game localization. Their discussions range from the challenge professional localizers face to the role of using authentic materials in the classroom to train new localization professionals. This paper discusses the issue of localization practices and game authenticity, addressing how game developers and localization professionals debate this issue. To do so, the paper defines localization and authenticity and presents a literature review on the theme. After that, we present the results from interviews and fieldwork at game conventions on three different themes: culture and authenticity in games, game changes during localization process, and authenticity definitions. We conclude that the discussion between authenticity and localization should be based on the localizer’s language so the research about this topic can be further investigated.

This article presents a descriptive empirical study of the Spanish translation of the video game Iron Man 2 (Sega 2010) in reference to its 50 cinematic sequences and its intertextual consistency across other Iron Man and related texts in the Marvel universe of movies and comic books. We used Rabadán’s (1991) translemic analysis model to analyze the translation while Vázquez Rodríguez’s (2016) taxonomy was applied to evaluate translation errors found in the dialogue script. The analysis shows that roughly one in five of the cinematic scenes contains translation errors. In addition, we have identified intertextual discrepancies of certain key names in Spanish, which, we argue, could disrupt the game’s enjoyability. Without access to the exact situational contexts we can only assume a breakdown in the work process, involving translators, dubbing directors, sound engineers, and QA testers. Additionally, our findings suggest the importance of overseeing the intertextual dimension across the transmedia franchises for coherent storytelling.