1. Introduction
Video game translation is a recent branch of translation, much younger than its other counterparts related to the cultural and entertainment arenas (literary and audiovisual translation, among others). In this specific case, translators and localisers have to adapt to a polymorphous product belonging to the software category, allying various media (textual and audiovisual), featuring a combination of many types of texts (legal, technical, commercial and literary, among others) and focusing on interactivity. This “transmedial” nature of the video game object poses numerous challenges to whoever tries to adapt them technically, linguistically and culturally (i.e. to localise them). Therefore, although video games localisation draws on other (translation) areas, it is a much more complex task that requires versatility and accurate information, including context. However, mistranslations may easily be made due to the mere fact that video games are often presented in an interactive non-linear way, with some strings being absolutely decontextualised, and no access to the primary source: the game, which still remains the safest option to prevent mistakes or word-for-word translations. This sometimes “blind” translation is a key difference between video game localisation and most of other forms of translation, a difference that needs emphasising from the very beginning since it conditions, to a certain extent, the whole process and the results that may be obtained, therefore ultimately impacting player satisfaction.
Indeed, for over fifty years now, the video game industry has developed and affirmed itself, taking a fair share of the entertainment market. More recently, with the advent of mobile technologies, this leisure has broadened its audience, touching an increasing number of consumers over the world, of all genders and age categories. Newzoo, a company that gathers data in the games industry, estimates that in 2017 the number of gamers worldwide would be 2.2 billion (McDonald, 2017), i.e. a bit less than one third of the global population. In economic terms, this means that the video game industry is very lucrative, with Newzoo expecting gamers around the globe to generate 108.9 billion dollars of game revenues in 2017 (ibid.), with the Asia-Pacific region – especially China - contributing around one-quarter of these global revenues and mobile gaming skyrocketing over the next few years. In comparison, the film industry (TV and video), with which the games industry is often compared, has generated, according to the statistics website Statista, 286.17 billion dollars in 2016, with China, India and the USA being the top markets.
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Therefore, the increased financial weight of the gaming sector has gradually made it clear for industry professionals, both developers and publishers, that they could generate exponential benefits from having their products translated and even localised, i.e. adapted to a specific culture. As the audience of players widens, so too does the variety of options offered for localisation, moving from the traditional minimal package of the FIGS (French, Italian, German and Spanish) to a more diversified market in terms of languages offered but also of varieties of one same language offered, with products being more and more tailored for very specific locales.
Given the tremendous success of video games in the world, this recent form of entertainment has progressively started gaining recognition both in the artistic and academic areas, for example with the creation of game awards and the increasing disciplines that take video games as subject matter for their research. This paper follows this current trend and explores the interaction between the “transmedial” product that is a video game and the crucial linguistic, cultural and eventually financial stakes embodied by localisation choices in general, and translation in particular. The focus adopted places the ultimate user of the localisation, the player, at the centre of the interrogations through the help of a questionnaire. This is relatively novel and follows suit with a trend of reception research initiated recently in Translation Studies, in particular in audiovisual translation and video game localisation. The research being conducted by a translator passionate about video games, it naturally delves into issues that ally both aspects. More precisely, the research explores francophone gamers’ satisfaction with the localisation into French of video games operated on computers. This central question, i.e. are francophone players satisfied with the quality of game localisations into French, relates to various other aspects that raise the researcher’s interest. The research therefore seeks to answer a three-fold question. Firstly, as mentioned earlier, francophone players’ satisfaction is the focal point of the study, along with the rationale(s) for such satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Secondly, in relation to the previous point, the research seeks to identify potential weak spots in video game localisation into French so as to improve the localisation process and results. Lastly, the questionnaire explores whether francophone gamers have the same linguistic stance regarding a foreign video game and another foreign cultural product. In other words, it seeks to determine if participants play in a given language (their mother tongue or the original language) and act in a different way with other products like books or movies.
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These various questions will be analysed and answered throughout the work, which is made up of seven chapters, including the introduction. After this brief introduction, Chapter 2 will provide an overview of the academic and industry panorama in video game localisation, starting by defining the key concepts of video game and localisation, as well as other relevant notions.
Chapter 3 will further explore the different types of research that have been conducted into video games, gamers, and localisation, both from the business and the academic perspectives, especially at the European and French levels. It will then present precursors of our reception research and explain what this research hopes to bring to light.
Chapter 4 will lay down the research methodology used in this participant-oriented research based on a questionnaire. It will explain all the elements that were taken into account before the design and launch of the survey before describing in detail all the sections featured in the questionnaire, the questions they included and the reasons for doing so.
Chapter 5 will present the results yielded by the survey following the order in which questions were displayed and therefore explained in the methodology chapter (chapter 4). This is the part where the initial research hypotheses will be set against data and supported or rejected. Other larger-scale studies on gaming and gamers will also be leveraged to serve as benchmark for our sample.
Chapter 6 will consist of a discussion of some elements highlighted in the questionnaire’s answers. This includes acknowledging the limitations of the research but also discussing aspects like linguistic variety, the quality of translations and dubbings, and the overall impact of video game localisation on player immersion.
Finally, Chapter 7 will conclude the whole research work, first summarising succinctly the findings and second by opening up the debate towards potential trends and evolutions related to the subject matter of the thesis, player satisfaction with video games operated on computers and localised into French
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