TRANSLATING VIDEO GAMES INTO ROMANIAN: YAY OR NAY?
TRANSLATING VIDEO GAMES INTO ROMANIAN: YAY OR NAY?

Summary/Abstract: It is a shared view among Romanian video gamers that translating computer games into Romanian would considerably decrease the value of the game highly reducing its impact on the market.This statement relies on the results of a survey applied to a sample of 113 gamers with an age range from 19 to 22. The statistic study sums up three extra and in-game factors that support the gamers’ preference for upholding English. Making use of Gideon Toury’s (1995) terms, the first factor refers to historical contextualization, namely Romanian post-communist orientation towards the Anglo-American culture. The second factor refers to the lack of prior successful game translations: a high percentage of respondents assert that the use of deficient translation patches has caused them the loss of the game. Following and completing Christiane Nord’s model of functional perspective analysis (1991/2005) on the extra and intertextual factors that influence the translation of a source text, the third series of factors taken into consideration refers to the translation context and to the target audience. This paper is concerned, therefore, with the linguistic and functional examination of various challenges that the cyber games translatability may raise. The author intends to determine what translation strategies may be used in order to fully convey the pragmatic message and functionality of a video game. The study is complemented with a contrastive analysis of examples from the linguistic corpus of one video game.

• Details
• Contents