Section 3: Experience with PC Games Localised into French

Section 3 was focused more specifically on localised game experience. It sought to collect information about the gamers’ satisfaction regarding games localised into French and operated on computers, i.e. the primary focus of this master’s thesis.

Choi and Pak insist that “Technical jargon and the profession’s technical terms may not be understood by the general public and should be avoided” in questionnaires (2005). To this end, when posting messages about the questionnaire on the forums we have deliberately switched “localisation” with “translation” to make it more understandable to the non-specialists, i.e. people that did not work in the translation or the game industries. Still, we have decided to keep the term as such in the survey proper, although it may fit into what Choi and Pak call “technical jargon”. Indeed, in order for this recurring term to be understood and clear at all times, a short simple definition was provided on the welcome page of the questionnaire (the Wix page) and was then made available to participants in every step of their answering by displaying it in the “description” field of the questionnaire, which appears at the top of every page.

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The first question of this section considered localisation from a general perspective by inquiring into the most common degree of game localisation encountered by participants. It took the form of a close-ended question based on the different levels identified byChandler and O’Malley (2012, pp. 8-11) and detailed in section 2.2.3.2. Degree zero (no localisation) was not offered for the sake of consistency, since the section was about localised games only. Such question was meant to give an idea of the general level of localisation of games into French, although of course it was biased because limited to the games played by participants. The option selected by participants might also reveal information about their preferences in terms of localisation degree.

The second question was open and made the participants think about the effect(s) of localisation on the gamer and especially on immersion. For this question, a very large textbox was provided so that participants would feel free to write as much as they wanted. The goal was to capture their perception of game localisation and to measure in an informal way to what extent localisation was crucial to the immersion process according to them.

The following question constituted the crux of the study: overall satisfaction with localised video games. This mandatory question had the participants grade their overall satisfaction towards the localisation into French of video games operated on computers. This means they were only allowed to consider the “adaptation” part, not the original features like gameplay when attributing the mark. This was at the core of our master’s thesis, trying to get first-hand impressions about what the people who played the games thought of localised versions. This overall mark was to be split up by focusing on different aspects in the following questions. The assessment was made through a six-point scale, 1 standing for “very dissatisfied”

and 6 representing “very satisfied”. The choice of an even number was made to force the respondents to take a stance, either on the satisfied or on the dissatisfied side, since on scales featuring odd numbers people tend to choose the middle option, an effect we tried to prevent.

Indeed, as Choi and Pak put it, a question with an odd number of categories “tends to result in neutral answers” whereas an even number of categories “tends to force respondents to take sides”, which was our goal here.

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In order to further elaborate on the topic of satisfaction, the following two questions were designed in a symmetric way: they were optional open questions that were meant to give players the freedom to quote examples from their own gaming experience. Although answers were bound to differ from one person to the next, they could still form the basis of a series of examples that can be further studied, in other works for instance. For each game, whether it illustrated successful or poor localisation according to respondents, the genre was asked.

Considering it was not possible to include in the same question both a textbox and a list, this field has been left for players to complete, which they have not always done using the typology suggested earlier, an aspect which introduces a small bias by forcing the researcher to make a decision with which the participant might not always agree, especially in the case of hybrid games. A condition was also added to the questions so that if an answer was provided, a sub question would pop, enabling the person to elaborate in a large textbox.

In relation, another question aimed at discovering which localisation issue was most recurring in players’ overall experience of localised games. In order to make sure respondents targeted one aspect in particular, only one choice was allowed and a set of answers was provided, with explanations between brackets when required. The “other: specify” field was also available and a large text box was added so that people could elaborate if they wished to do so. The list of options was created taking various resources into account. The “technical considerations” part of a localisation planning-phase checklist made by Chandler and O’Malley (2012, p. 13) was used as a starting point, especially for technical bugs. Personal gaming experience and information gathered through readings made for part 2 (for instance Bernal Merino, 2015 and O’Hagan and Mangiron, 2013) helped complete this list, which included both linguistic, technical and cultural issues.

This question was followed up by a mandatory open one about the impact of these bugs, assuming that once they were broken up into discrete elements, it would probably be easier for gamers to answer in a specific way, rather than asking them to think for themselves about the issues they had encountered.

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Last, a mandatory question had players rank gameplay, graphics, scenario and language (being understood as linguistic signs, not as a specific language). Number 1 corresponded to what they found was most important and number 4 to what mattered least. Participants also had to explain their choices. This ranking not only allowed us to see what prevailed in the mind of a gamer – embodied by participants from our sample - but also to assess which place they attributed to language and why. Is a good translation a priority for gamers or would they still play a badly-translated game if they liked the rest? This is the question that will be answered when analysing the results, in section 5.4.5. The section closed on that more generic question that goes beyond the scope of the study, and a new section opened, focused on setting video games against other cultural and entertainment products from a linguistic perspective.