A Case Study Of Flavor Text Translation In Hearthstone Under The Skopos Theory

The video game industry,with a total asset of over multiple billion US dollars,is one of the pillars of the entertainment industry.As the global game market grows,game translation,an important part of game localization,is playing an increasingly indispensable role and arouses heated discussion by translators and researchers.This study targets at analyzing the translation strategies of Hearthstone Flavor Texts adopted by Blizzard Simplified Chinese localization team under the Skopos theory on the basis of 2679 pairs of Hearth Stone Flavor Texts translations.Practicable methods are summarized and specific strategies are also concluded with revision.Suggestions for improvement will also be proposed on the basis of the analysis.It is found that there are five types of most commonly seen difficulties that game translators will encounter to fulfill the translation purpose to entertain the player while maintaining the comprehensibility and the specific writing style of this text type,including the high requirement of knowledge on the game background,poorly entertaining contents,puns,untranslatable language differences and wide cultural gaps.To deal with these difficulties,supplementary translation and re-creation are proposed in addition to literal translation in the study.Re-creation can be subdivided into four types on the basis of inspiration sources,including Card Name,Card Effect,Illustration and part of the Source Text.There is also an additional strategy based on already used strategies-referring to Chinese idioms.A questionnaire survey is a conducted under the Skopos Theory to evaluate the translation from the perspective of players and to collect opinions on some selected translations to be improved.Recommendations are given to game translators for improvement:always be a player first;keep exchanging ideas with target players;and expand one’s scope of knowledge by using search engines.This study is featured by originality from two aspects,including novelty of the research subject and of the research approach.Provided that there are few related researches systematically focused on the translation of Hearthstone Flavor Texts,this paper systematically summarizes the translation strategies adopted in Hearthstone Flavor Texts.In terms of research methods,this paper uses the questionnaire survey method to examine the effects of translation strategies from the perspective of players.This paper also has rich research value.In regards of theory,the study enriches the research on game localization and helps the video game translators deepen the understanding of game localization as a guide based on the functionalist Skopos Theory;in regards of translation practice,the study uses qualitative and quantitative methods to summarize translation strategies;in regards of translation teaching,it is hoped that this paper can attract the attention of translation colleges and translation majors for more inspirations on the cultivation of video game translation talents.