Altruism: The Case of Amateur Translations

Another driver for localisation worth mentioning is altruism, coupled with passion for the game in itself. Please note that we do not mean to say that professional localisers and translators themselves are not passionate about video games. They sure are, and actually, according to Clyde Mandelin, a fan translator who turned professional, it is common for professional game translators, at least in his company, to be former or current fan translators (Parkin, 2008). This part aims at focusing on a strictly non-profit driver entailing a somewhat different kind of localisation, a more spontaneous and horizontal process emerging from the gamer community itself.

With the shift to a new Web, Web 2.0, users started actively taking part in the Internet by generating content, thus becoming both consumers and producers and engaging in a

“participatory culture” (O’Hagan, 2009b, p. 96). Without a doubt, this shift has enabled certain forms of voluntary and community translations to emerge, develop and organize, to the extent that what used to be unsolicited interventions have now become very welcome and even solicited translation services.

28 2.2.2.2.1 Romhacking

As far as multimedia content is concerned, the earliest form of fan translation or amateur translation comes from the subtitling into English of Japanese animes (a practice called fansubbing) in the 1980’s (O’Hagan, 2009b). The aim of this practice was to give access to these productions to a wide audience that had not mastered the Japanese language. A similar trend also emerged in the field of video games, invigorated by the multiplication of emulators in the late 1990’s. Emulators are virtual machines installed on computers that enable players to execute games on virtual equipment, be it obsolete or a different platform. This change was ground-breaking since, contrary to computer games that are easier to modify, console games are “a tightly sealed closed system, making external changes more difficult.” (ibid., p. 108).

Thus, the practice of “romhacking” blossomed (Díaz Montón, 2011) since emulators generated a renewed interest for old classics and the emergence of a trend to translate titles that had not been translated before (ibid., p. 72). This concerned, for example, Japanese role playing games (JRPGs), due to the tremendous worldwide success of Final Fantasy VII released by Square in January 1997 and, in parallel, to the small stock of titles of this genre available in English (Parkin, 2008).

The name “romhacking” comes from the fact that, in order to translate the games, players had to modify the data contained in the binary read-only memory (ROM) of the games:

mostly the text but also possibly the graphics, the scenario and the gameplay (Díaz Montón, 2011). The modified versions were then released in the form of ROM patches. “Translation hacking” (O’Hagan, 2009b) is thus one of the various possibilities of romhacking. These hackers/players then organized into various teams with respect to their languages and locales, and shared the workload and tasks. According to Díaz Montón, amateur translation of video games was, and still is, a popular practice throughout languages and countries (2011, p. 72).

Apart from generating translations from scratch for titles that had not been previously localised in the target locale, romhackers also produce “improved translations” of localised titles, for example that of Dragon Age (ibid., p. 73).

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On some occasions, romhackers also perform “undubbing” on fully (but poorly) localised games, meaning that they modify the contents of the dubbed games in order to retrieve the original audio files, while maintaining the localised subtitles (Díaz Montón, 2011, p. 72).

Interestingly, according to what the fan translators from Clan DLAN told Díaz Montón (ibid.), these dedicated gamers originally create the translations for their own use, as a challenge. Yet, they end up sharing them with other people because they find it sad that some players are unable to enjoy the game only because they do not understand the language.

It is worth stressing that being voluntary non-commercial projects, these types of translations are not subject to strict deadlines and receive very positive feedback from gamers that are happy to get releases in their locales (Díaz Montón, 2011). They also lay emphasis on the correctness of the translation from the linguistic point of view, with no typos, no literal translations and a natural flow (ibid.). Displaying all special characters in the target languages and preventing spelling mistakes are also priorities for the teams. The rest (creativity, beautiful style) comes second (Díaz Montón, 2011, p. 78). One can also highlight the fact that, as these translations are performed by experimented players who know the game and have access to it i.e. to the information in context, the translations provided can be accurate (ibid., p. 79), sometimes more than professional ones. Yet, the localisation challenges remain similar to those found in professional localisation, since a common operation for romhackers is to add the possibility for the font to accommodate special characters (ibid., p. 80).

Furthermore, this type of localisation - a practice quite similar to fan-subbing, though more technical - normally is illegal for copyright reasons. Yet, companies never charged anyone, since new localisations extend their product’s reach (ibid., p. 81). Now, we shall focus on a more novel trend in amateur translation: crowdsourcing.

30 2.2.2.2.2 Crowdsourcing

Nowadays, another form of amateur translation has developed, for video games as well as for many more digital products: crowdsourcing. The online Oxford English Dictionary (2017) defines crowdsourcing as “[t]he practice of obtaining information or services by soliciting input from a large number of people, typically via the Internet and often without offering compensation”. In this case, the service provided was translation of digital content.

The very difference between this practice and the ones mentioned earlier is the fact that crowdsourced translations are both welcome and even solicited contributions. In O’Hagan’s words, “these mostly unsolicited and often legally illicit user-based translation activities are now turning into solicited legitimate activities developing as an increasingly accepted business model” (2009b, p. 110), which is why she concludes that “crowdsourcing takes a step further the trend of leveraging free labour of love” (ibid., p. 111).

Indeed, the popular social network Facebook drew on its users to translate the website first into Spanish, completed in February 2008, followed by German and French shortly after (Facebook Press Releases, 2008) and ultimately by another 60+ languages (Kincaid, 2009). The company has also extended this business model to the developers whose websites or apps use the platform Facebook Connect, granting them access to its community of volunteers (ibid.).

Magdalena Dombek explored Facebook users’ possible motivations to take part in the crowdsourcing of the website, among which she identified “belief in mutual exchange and reciprocity”, “reputation”, “identification” with the group and the ability to network (2012).

The sense of community thus seems to be an important driver in this type of projects.

This relatively new way has also been applied to video games. Díaz Montón quotes the example of the online game eRepublik (Díaz Montón, 2011), but one can also leverage the instance of the tremendously popular sandbox game Minecraft (released by Mojang in 2009) which, according to its CrowdIn page, has currently been fully translated from American English into 17 locales, many more still being translated and/or reviewed at the moment.

Funnily enough, when the page was accessed on April 14^th, 2017, the French translations had only been approved up to 98% of the content and the version was thus not considered

“completed” (CrowdIn, 2017).

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In parallel, participation in open-source projects and especially in the translation and localisation of video games can also be considered as a form of crowd-sourcing, since the product is made available for everyone to use and contribute to improve it and make it accessible to more players. Mercedes Sanchez Espinoza’s thesis, presented at the University of Geneva in 2015, explored through a qualitative approach the localisation workflow and technologies used by 17 of SourceForge’s most popular games. Her findings emphasise that of all the projects sampled, only the game called FreeCol does not have its own team of translators assigned to the project. Although it still functions on a voluntary basis, translators are taken from the crowdsourcing collaborative platform called TranslateWiki, which shows the interaction between user-generated translations, open-source projects and crowdsourcing.

The advent of the Web 2.0 has thus been decisive on the amateur game translation stage, since there was a significant increase in the number and reach of what O’Hagan calls “user-generated translations” (UGTs) (O’Hagan, 2009b, p. 4). The proliferation of open-source game projects with users voluntarily contributing to their localisation, like that of Super Tux Kart⁶ is yet another example of the empowerment of users in general, and more specifically in the area of game localisation in the context of the Web 2.0. Moreover, this tendency that fans have to localise or use amateur translations of video games is an important element that has to be factored in upon analysing gamers’ opinion on professionally localised versions of games. This will be touched on further in chapter 6. After analysing the various rationales behind the decision to localise a game, let us examine in detail the elements that might need to be adapted to the new audience.