System Text Translation In Game Localization: Challenges And Strategies

In the process of game localization,translation plays a vital role in ensuring a game’s successful entry into the target market.Since system text,among all types of in-game texts,is the most frequently interacted and underpins gameplay and user experience,the pragmatic goal of its translation is to secure the same gaming experience for players from different language backgrounds.Taking the cases of Game M and Game W,this paper discusses the textual features of system text,identifies common challenges the author encountered in the Chinese-to-English translation of the two games,and proposes strategies accordingly.Basically,system text is informative and operative text featuring gameful content and multimodal and fragmented format.In its translation,complicated rich text,space constraints,fragmented context,and cultural differences all pose challenges for translators to ensure the quality of the target text.By analyzing typical examples,this paper proposes four translation strategies to address the above problems: 1)strictly conform to the norms of rich text to ensure proper grammar and formatting;2)simplify the content while ensuring the integrity of key information;3)utilize multi-dimensional information to reconstruct the context to determine the meanings,improve cohesion and emphasize the hierarchical relationship among the translation items;4)use expressions close to the target players’ cultural background and preference to increase the cultural and emotional appeal of the game.Given the increasingly fierce competition among Chinese game developers in seizing international markets,by summarizing the common problems translators may encounter in the localization process,this paper hopes to provide some help for Chinese game localizers to improve content quality.